Mary Lamb having become ill again had been moved to Edmonton, to a private home for mental patients.  Lamb followed her soon after, and settled in the same house.  It still stands (1912) almost exactly as in the Lambs’ day.]

LETTER 579

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER

[No date.  May, 1833.]

D’r F. Can you oblige me by sending 4 Box orders undated for the Olympic Theatre?  I suppose Knowles can get ’em.  It is for the Waldens, with whom I live.  The sooner, the better, that they may not miss the “Wife”—­I meet you at the Talfourds’ Saturday week, and if they can’t, perhaps you can, give me a bed.

Yours ratherish unwell

C. LAMB.

Mr. Walden’s, Church Street, Edmonton.

Or write immediately to say if you can’t get em.

[Knowles’ play “The Wife,” produced at Covent Garden, was moved to the Olympic on May 9.]

LETTER 580

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN FORSTER

[P.M.  May 12, 1833.]

Dear Boy, I send you the original Elias, complete.  When I am a little composed, I shall hope to see you and Proctor here; may be, may see you first in London.

C.L.

[In the Dyce and Forster collection, at South Kensington, are preserved some of these MSS.

Here should come a letter to Miss Rickman, dated May 23, 1833.  “Perhaps, as Miss Kelly is just now in notoriety, it may amuse you to know that ‘Barbara S.’ is all of it true of her, being all communicated to me from her own mouth.  The ‘wedding’ you of course found out to be Sally Burney’s.”]

LETTER 581

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

End of May nearly, [1833].

Dear Wordsworth, Your letter, save in what respects your dear Sister’s health, chear’d me in my new solitude.  Mary is ill again.  Her illnesses encroach yearly.  The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful.  I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing.  Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration—­shocking as they were to me then.  In short, half her life she is dead to me, and the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock.  With such prospects, it seem’d to me necessary that she should no longer live with me, and be fluttered with continual removals, so I am come to live with her, at a Mr. Walden’s and his wife, who take in patients, and have arranged to lodge and board us only.  They have had the care of her before.  I see little of her; alas!  I too often hear her.  Sunt lachrymae rerum—­and you and I must bear it—­