LETTER 296

CHARLES LAMB TO B.R.  HAYDON

Tuesday, 29th [October, 1822].

Dear H., I have written a very respectful letter to Sir W.S.  Godwin did not write, because he leaves all to his committee, as I will explain to you.  If this rascally weather holds, you will see but one of us on that day.

Yours, with many thanks,

C. LAMB.

LETTER 297

CHARLES LAMB TO SIR WALTER SCOTT

East India House, London,

29th October 1822.

Dear Sir,—­I have to acknowledge your kind attention to my application to Mr. Haydon.  I have transmitted your draft to Mr. G[odwin]’s committee as an anonymous contribution through me.  Mr. Haydon desires his thanks and best respects to you, but was desirous that I should write to you on this occasion.  I cannot pass over your kind expressions as to myself.  It is not likely that I shall ever find myself in Scotland, but should the event ever happen, I should be proud to pay my respects to you in your own land.  My disparagement of heaths and highlands—­if I said any such thing in half earnest,—­you must put down as a piece of the old Vulpine policy.  I must make the most of the spot I am chained to, and console myself for my flat destiny as well as I am able.  I know very well our mole-hills are not mountains, but I must cocker them up and make them look as big and as handsome as I can, that we may both be satisfied.  Allow me to express the pleasure I feel on an occasion given me of writing to you, and to subscribe myself, dear sir, your obliged and respectful servant,

CHARLES LAMB.

[See note to the letter to Godwin above.  Lamb and Scott never met.  Talfourd, however, tells us that “he used to speak with gratitude and pleasure of the circumstances under which he saw him once in Fleet-street.  A man, in the dress of a mechanic, stopped him just at Inner Temple-gate, and said, touching his hat, ’I beg your pardon, sir, but perhaps you would like to see Sir Walter Scott; that is he just crossing the road;’ and Lamb stammered out his hearty thanks to his truly humane informer.”

Mr. Lang has recently discovered that also in 1818 or thereabouts Sir
Walter invited Lamb to Abbotsford.]

LETTER 298

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ROBINSON

[Dated at end:  Nov. 11, 1822.]

Dear Sir, We have to thank you, or Mrs. Robinson—­ for I think her name was on the direction—­for the best pig, which myself, the warmest of pig-lovers, ever tasted.  The dressing and the sauce were pronounced incomparable by two friends, who had the good fortune to drop in to dinner yesterday, but I must not mix up my cook’s praises with my acknowledgments; let me but have leave to say that she and we did your pig justice.  I should dilate on the crackling—­done to a turn—­but I am afraid Mrs. Clarkson, who, I hear, is with you, will set me down as an Epicure.  Let it suffice, that you have spoil’d my appetite for boiled mutton for some time to come.  Your brother Henry partook of the cold relics—­by which he might give a good guess at what it had been hot.