Should fate ever so order it that you shall be in town with your sister, mine bids me say that she shall have great pleasure in being introduced to her.  I think I must give up the cause of the Bank—­from nine to nine is galley-slavery, but I hope it is but temporary.  Your endeavour at explaining Fox’s insight into the natures of animals must fail, as I shall transcribe the passage.  It appears to me that he stopt short in time, and was on the brink of falling with his friend Naylor, my favourite.—­The book shall be forthcoming whenever your friend can make convenient to call for it.

They have dragged me again into the Magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone.  “Some brains” (I think Ben Jonson says it) “will endure but one skimming.”  We are about to have an inundation of poetry from the Lakes, Wordsworth and Southey are coming up strong from the North.  The she Coleridges have taken flight, to my regret.  With Sara’s own-made acquisitions, her unaffectedness and no-pretensions are beautiful.  You might pass an age with her without suspecting that she knew any thing but her mother’s tongue.  I don’t mean any reflection on Mrs. Coleridge here.  I had better have said her vernacular idiom.  Poor C. I wish he had a home to receive his daughter in.  But he is but as a stranger or a visitor in this world.  How did you like Hartley’s sonnets?  The first, at least, is vastly fine.  Lloyd has been in town a day or two on business, and is perfectly well.  I am ashamed of the shabby letters I send, but I am by nature anything but neat.  Therein my mother bore me no Quaker.  I never could seal a letter without dropping the wax on one side, besides scalding my fingers.  I never had a seal too of my own.  Writing to a great man lately, who is moreover very Heraldic, I borrowed a seal of a friend, who by the female side quarters the Protectorial Arms of Cromwell.  How they must have puzzled my correspondent!—­My letters are generally charged as double at the Post office, from their inveterate clumsiness of foldure.  So you must not take it disrespectful to your self if I send you such ungainly scraps.  I think I lose L100 a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up Accounts.  How I puzzle ’em out at last is the wonder.  I have to do with millions. I?

It is time to have done my incoherences.

Believe me Yours Truly

C. LAMB.

Tuesd 11 Ma 23.

[Lamb had sent Elia to Woodbridge.  Bernard Barton’s sister was Maria Hack, author of many books for children.  The Quaker incident is in the essay “Imperfect Sympathies.”  Carlisle was Sir Anthony Carlisle.

“Your endeavour at explaining Fox’s insight.”  See letter above.  James Nayler (1617?-1660), an early Quaker who permitted his admirers to look upon him as a new Christ.  He went to extremes totally foreign to the spirit of the Society.  Barton made a paraphrase of Nayler’s “Last Testimony.”