God love her—­to think that she should have had to toil thro’ five octavos of that cursed (I forget I write to a Quaker) Abbeypony History, and then to abridge them to 3, and all for L113.  At her years, to be doing stupid Jesuits’ Latin into English, when she should be reading or writing Romances.  Heaven send her Uncle do not breed her up a Quarterly Reviewer!—­which reminds me, that he has spoken very respectfully of you in the last number, which is the next thing to having a Review all to one’s self.  Your description of Mr. Mitford’s place makes me long for a pippin and some carraways and a cup of sack in his orchard, when the sweets of the night come in.

Farewell.

C. LAMB.

[In the 1694 folio of George Fox’s Journal the revelation of the names of creatures occurs twice, once under Notts in 1647 and again under Mansfield in 1648.

“Sewell.” The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers, 1722.  By William Sewell (1654-1720).

“In my Quaker’s meeting”—­the Elia essay (see Vol.  II.).

“I once quoted two Lines.”  Possibly, Mr. A.R.  Waller suggests to me, the lines:—­

            Because on earth their names
       In Fame’s eternal volume shine for aye,

quoted by Hazlitt in his Round Table essay “On Posthumous Fame,” and again in one of his Edinburgh Review articles.  They are presumably based upon the Inferno, Canto IV. (see Haselfoot’s translation, second edition, 1899, page 21, lines 74-78).  But the “manufacturer” of them must have had Spenser’s line in his mind, “On Fame’s eternall bead-roll worthie to be fyled” (Faerie Queene, Bk.  IV., Canto II., Stanza 32).  They have not yet been found in any translation of Dante.  This explanation would satisfy Lamb’s words “quoted in a book,” i.e., The Round Table, published in 1817.

“Miss Coleridge”—­Coleridge’s daughter Sara, born in 1802, who had been brought up by her uncle, Southey.  She had translated Martin Dobrizhoffer’s Latin history of the Abipones in order to gain funds for her brother Derwent’s college expenses.  Her father considered the translation “unsurpassed for pure mother English by anything I have read for a long time.”  Sara Coleridge married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, in 1829.  She edited her father’s works and died in 1852.  At the present time she and her mother were visiting the Gillmans.

Mr. Mitford was John Mitford (1781-1859), rector of Benhall, in Suffolk, and editor of old poets.  Later he became editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine.  He was a cousin of Mary Russell Mitford.  In the Gentleman’s Magazine for May, 1838, is a review of Talfourd’s edition of Lamb’s Letters, probably from his pen, in which he records a visit to the Lambs in 1827.]

LETTER 312

CHARLES LAMB TO WALTER WILSON