not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be.  If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour of me at the London Tavern.  ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying.  Mrs. Wordsworth will go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realised.  Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon’s.  I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office.  I hate all such people—­accountants’ deputy accountants.  The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon.  I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go.  They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero.  By a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one o’clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us.  Dear W.W., be thankful for liberty.

To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

The famous pigling

9 March, 1822.

DEAR COLERIDGE,

It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well:  they are such interesting creatures at a certain age.  What a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon!  You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce.  Did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis?  Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion?  Was the crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate?  Had you no complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire?  Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?  Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business.  I never knew him give anything away in my life.  He would not begin with strangers.  I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate.  To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things which I could never think of sending away.  Teal, widgeon, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese—­your tame villatic things—­Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled,