But the devil of a reader he must be who prances through it in five minutes, and no longer have I received the parcel.  It was a little tantalizing to me to receive a letter from Landor, Gebir Landor, from Florence, to say he was just sitting down to read my “Elia,” just received, but the letter was to go out before the reading.  There are calamities in authorship which only authors know.  I am going to call on Moxon on Monday, if the throng of carriages in Dover Street on the morn of publication do not barricade me out.

With many thanks, and most respectful remembrances to your sister,

Yours,

C. LAMB.

Have you seen Coleridge’s happy exemplification in English of the
Ovidian elegiac metre?—­

        In the Hexameter rises the fountain’s silvery current,
        In the Pentameter aye falling in melody down.

My sister is papering up the book—­careful soul!

[Moxon published a superb edition of Rogers’ Poems illustrated by Turner and Stothard.  Lamb had received an advance copy.  The sonnet to Rogers in The Times was printed on December 13, 1833.  It ran thus:—­

        TO SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ., ON THE NEW EDITION OF
        HIS “PLEASURES OF MEMORY”

        When thy gay book hath paid its proud devoirs,
        Poetic friend, and fed with luxury
        The eye of pampered aristocracy
        In glittering drawing-rooms and gilt boudoirs,
        O’erlaid with comments of pictorial art,
        However rich and rare, yet nothing leaving
        Of healthful action to the soul-conceiving
        Of the true reader—­yet a nobler part
        Awaits thy work, already classic styled. 
        Cheap-clad, accessible, in homeliest show
        The modest beauty through the land shall go
        From year to year, and render life more mild;
        Refinement to the poor man’s hearth shall give,
        And in the moral heart of England live.

C. LAMB.

Thomas Stothard, then in his seventy-ninth year, Lamb had met at Henry Rogers’, who had died at Christmas, 1832.  The following was the copy of verses printed in The Athenaeum, December 21, 1833 ("that most romantic tale” was Peter Wilkins):—­

TO T. STOTHARD, ESQ.

      On his Illustrations of the Poems of Mr. Rogers

      Consummate Artist, whose undying name
      With classic Rogers shall go down to fame,
      Be this thy crowning work!  In my young days
      How often have I with a child’s fond gaze
      Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done: 
      Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! 
      All Fielding’s, Smollett’s heroes, rose to view;
      I saw, and I believed the phantoms true. 
      But, above all, that most romantic tale
      Did o’er my raw credulity prevail,
      Where Glums and