This is all in old carved wooden letters.  The countenance smiling, sweet, and intellectual beyond measure, even as He was immeasurable.  It may be a forgery.  They laugh at me and tell me Ireland is in Paris, and has been putting off a portrait of the Black Prince.  How far old wood may be imitated I cannot say.  Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry.  I am confident no painter on either side the Channel could have painted any thing near like the face I saw.  Again, would such a painter and forger have expected L40 for a thing, if authentic, worth L4000?  Talma is not in the secret, for he had not even found out the rhymes in the first inscription.  He is coming over with it, and, my life to Southey’s Thalaba, it will gain universal faith.

The letter is wanted, and I am wanted.  Imagine the blank filled up with all kind things.

Our joint hearty remembrances to both of you.  Yours as ever,

C. LAMB.

[Frank was Francis John Field, Barron Field’s brother, in the India House.

Shelley was drowned on July 8, 1822.

Talma was Francois Joseph Talma (1763-1826), the great French tragedian.  Lamb, introduced by John Howard Payne, saw him in “Regulus,” but not understanding French was but mildly interested.  “Ah,” said Talma in the account by James Kenney printed in Henry Angelo’s Pic Nic, “I was not very happy to-night; you must see me in ‘Scylla.’” “Incidit in Scyllam,” said Lamb, “qui vult vitare Charybdiro.”  “Ah, you are a rogue; you are a great rogue,” was Talma’s reply.  Talma had bought a pair of bellows with Shakespeare’s head on it.  Lamb’s belief in the authenticity of this portrait was misplaced, as the following account from Chambers’ Journal for September 27, 1856, will show:—­

About the latter part of the last century, one Zincke, an artist of little note, but grandson of the celebrated enameller of that name, manufactured fictitious Shakespeares by the score....  The most famous of Zincke’s productions is the well-known Talma Shakespeare, which gentle Charles Lamb made a pilgrimage to Paris to see; and when he did see, knelt down and kissed with idolatrous veneration.  Zincke painted it on a larger panel than was necessary for the size of the picture, and then cut away the superfluous wood, so as to leave the remainder in the shape of a pair of bellows....  Zincke probably was thinking of “a muse of fire” when he adopted this strange method of raising the wind; but he made little by it, for the dealer into whose hands the picture passed, sold it as a curiosity, not an original portrait, for L5.  The buyer, being a person of ingenuity, and fonder of money than curiosities, fabricated a series of letters to and from Sir Kenelm Digby, and, passing over to France, planted—­the slang term used among the less honest of the curiosity-dealing fraternity—­the picture and the letters in an old chateau near Paris.  Of course a confederate managed to discover the plant, in the presence of witnesses, and great was the excitement that ensued.  Sir Kenelm Digby had been in France in the reign of Charles I., and the fictitious correspondence proved that the picture was an original, and had been painted by Queen Elizabeth’s command, on the lid of her favourite pair of bellows!