invention; but if there were such darling things as old Chaucer sings, I would up behind you on the horse of brass, and frisk off for Prester John’s country.  But these are all tales; a horse of brass never flew, and a king’s daughter never talked with birds!  The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set.  You’ll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them.  Pray try and cure yourself.  Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace’s, ’twas none of my thought originally).  Shave yourself oftener.  Eat no saffron, for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow.  Pray, to avoid the fiend.  Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. Shave the upper lip.  Go about like an European.  Read no books of voyages (they are nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy under.  Above all, don’t go to any sights of wild beasts.  That has been your ruin.  Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate understanding.  And think about common things more....  I supped last night with Rickman, and met a merry natural captain, who pleases himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O. language.  ’Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because he was so much of the gentleman.  Rickman is a man ’absolute in all numbers’.  I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not go to Tartary first; for you’ll never come back.  Have a care, my dear friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving.  ’Tis terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound.  To sit at table (the reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.

God bless you:  do come to England.  Air and exercise may do great things.  Talk with some minister.  Why not your father?

God dispose all for the best.  I have discharged my duty.

To MRS. WORDSWORTH

Friends’ importunities

East India House, 18 Feb. 1818.

MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,

I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter.  My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts.  I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.  The reason why I cannot write letters at home, is, that I am never alone.  Plato’s—­(I write to W.W. now)—­Plato’s double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate.  Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so.  I cannot walk home from office