The hope is gone.  I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk, with the only hope that some Pulmonary affliction may relieve me.  Vide Lord Palmerston’s report of the Clerks in the war office (Debates, this morning’s Times) by which it appears in 20 years, as many Clerks have been coughd and catarrhd out of it into their freer graves.

Thank you for asking about the Pictures.  Milton hangs over my fire side in Covt.  Card, (when I am there), the rest have been sold for an old song, wanting the eloquent tongue that should have set them off!

You have gratifyd me with liking my meeting with Dodd.  For the Malvolio story—­the thing is become in verity a sad task and I eke it out with any thing.  If I could slip out of it I sh’d be happy, but our chief reputed assistants have forsaken us.  The opium eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling; and in short I shall go on from dull to worse, because I cannot resist the Bookseller’s importunity—­the old plea you know of authors, but I believe on my part sincere.

Hartley I do not so often see, but I never see him in unwelcome hour.  I thoroughly love and honor him.

I send you a frozen Epistle, but it is winter and dead time of the year with me.  May heaven keep something like spring and summer up with you, strengthen your eyes and make mine a little lighter to encounter with them, as I hope they shall yet and again, before all are closed.

Yours, with every kind rem’be.

C.L.

I had almost forgot to say, I think you thoroughly right about presentation copies.  I should like to see you print a book I should grudge to purchase for its size.  D——­n me, but I would have it though!

[John Lamb’s will left everything to his brother.  We must suppose that his widow was independently provided for.  I doubt if the brothers had seen each other except casually for some time.  The Elia essay “My Relations” contains John Lamb’s full-length portrait under the name of James Elia.

Captain Burney died on November 17, 1821,

“The foul enchanter—­letters four do form his name.”  From Coleridge’s war eclogue, “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” where the letters form the name of Pitt.  Here they stand for Joseph Hume, not Lamb’s friend, but Joseph Hume, M.P. (1777-1855), who had attacked with success abuses in the East India Company; had revised economically the system of collecting the revenue, thus touching Wordsworth as Distributor of Stamps; and had opposed Vansittart’s scheme for the reduction of pension charges.

“Vide Lord Palmerston’s report.”  In the Times of March 21 is the report of a debate on the estimates.  Palmerston proved a certain amount of reduction of salary in the War Office.  Incidentally he remarked that “since 1810 not fewer than twenty-six clerks had died of pulmonary complaints, and disorders arising from sedentary habits.”