Fanny Holcroft is just come in, with her paternal severity of aspect.  She has frozen a bright thought which should have follow’d.  She makes us marble, with too little conceiving.  Twas respecting the Signor, whom I honour on this side idolatry.  Well, more of this anon.

We are setting out to walk to Enfield after our Beans and Bacon, which are just smoking.

Kindest remembrances to the G.’s ever.

From Islinton,

2d day, 3d month of my Hegira or Flight from Leadenhall.

C.L.  Olim Clericus.

["To Allsop’s.”  Allsop says in his Letters... of Coleridge that he and the Lambs were housemates for a long time.

“Vide Lond.  Mag. for July”—­where the Elia essay “The Convalescent” was printed.

“The Odes”—­Odes and Addresses to Great People, 1825. Coleridge after reading the book had written to Lamb as follows (the letter is printed by Hood):—­

MY DEAR CHARLES,—­This afternoon, a little, thin, mean-looking sort of a foolscap, sub-octavo of poems, printed on very dingy outsides, lay on the table, which the cover informed me was circulating in our book-club, so very Grub-Streetish in all its appearance, internal as well as external, that I cannot explain by what accident of impulse (assuredly there was no motive in play) I came to look into it.  Least of all, the title, Odes and Addresses to Great Men, which connected itself in my head with Rejected Addresses, and all the Smith and Theodore Hook squad.  But, my dear Charles, it was certainly written by you, or under you, or una eum you.  I know none of your frequent visitors capacious and assimilative enough of your converse to have reproduced you so honestly, supposing you had left yourself in pledge in his lock-up house.  Gillman, to whom I read the spirited parody on the introduction to Peter Bell, the Ode to the Great Unknown, and to Mrs. Fry; he speaks doubtfully of Reynolds and Hood.  But here come Irving and Basil Montagu.

Thursday night 10 o’clock.—­No!  Charles, it is you.  I have read them over again, and I understand why you have anon’d the book.  The puns are nine in ten good—­many excellent —­the Newgatory transcendent.  And then the exemplum sine exemplo of a volume of personalities, and contemporaneities, without a single line that could inflict the infinitesimal of an unpleasance on any man in his senses:  saving and except perhaps in the envy-addled brain of the despiser of your Lays.  If not a triumph over him, it is at least an ovation.  Then, moreover, and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self, who is there but you who can write the musical lines and stanzas that are intermixed?