LETTER 554

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[No date.  Jan., 1833.]

I have a proof from Dilke. That serves for next Saturday.  What Forster had, will serve a second.  I sent you a third concluding article for him and us (a capital hit, I think, about Cervantes) of which I leave you to judge whether we shall not want it to print before a third or even second week.  In that case beg D. to clap them in all at once; and keep the Atheneums to print from.  What I send is the concluding Article of the painters.

Soften down the Title in the Book to

“Defect of the Imaginative Faculty in Artists.”

Consult Dilke.

[Lamb’s Elia essay “Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art,” intended originally for The Englishman’s Magazine, was partly printed by Forster in The Reflector and finally printed in full in The Athenaeum in January and February, 1833.  The reference to Don Quixote is at the end.  Moxon was already printing the Last Essays of Elia.

“Consult Dilke” was a favourite phrase with Lamb and Hood and, long before, with Keats.]

LETTER 555

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[P.M.  Jan. 3(1833).]

Be sure and let me have the Atheneum—­or, if they don’t appear, the Copy back again.  I have no other.

I am glad you are introduced to Rickman, cultivate the introduction.  I will not forget to write to him.

I want to see Blackwood, but not without you.

We are yet Emma-less.

And so that is all I can remember.

This is a corkscrew.

[Here is a florid corkscrew.]

C. Lamb, born 1775
flourished about
the year 1832.

C.L.  Fecit.—­

[Lamb refers still to the “Barrenness of Imagination” series.

There are several scraps addressed by Lamb to Forster in the South Kensington Museum; but they are undated and of little importance.  I append one or two here:—­]

LETTER 556

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER

[No date.]

Orders.

Go to Dilke’s, or Let Mockson, and ax him to add this to what I sent him a few days since, or to continue it the week after.  The Plantas &c. are capital.

Requests.

Come down with M. and Dante and L.E.L. on Sunday.

ELIA.

I don’t mean at his House, but the Atheneum office.  Send it there.  Hand shakes.

[The Plantas would probably be a reference to the family of Joseph Plantas of the British Museum.  M. and Dante and L.E.L. would be Moxon, Cary and Letitia Landon, the poetess, to whom Forster was for a while engaged.