Dear Lamb,—­I address you with all humility, because I know you to
    be tenax propositi.  Hear me, I entreat you, with patience.

It is strange with what different feelings an author and a bookseller looks at the same manuscript.  I know this by experience:  I was an author, I am a bookseller.  The author thinks what will conduce to his honour:  the bookseller what will cause his commodities to sell.

You, or some other wise man, I have heard to say, It is children that read children’s books, when they are read, but it is parents that choose them.  The critical thought of the tradesman put itself therefore into the place of the parent, and what the parent will condemn.

We live in squeamish days.  Amid the beauties of your manuscript, of which no man can think more highly than I do, what will the squeamish say to such expressions as these,—­’devoured their limbs, yet warm and trembling, lapping the blood,’ page 10.  Or to the giant’s vomit, page 14; or to the minute and shocking description of the extinguishing the giant’s eye in the page following.  You, I daresay, have no formed plan of excluding the female sex from among your readers, and I, as a bookseller, must consider that if you have you exclude one half of the human species.

    Nothing is more easy than to modify these things if you please,
    and nothing, I think, is more indispensable.

    Give me, as soon as possible, your thoughts on the matter.

I should also like a preface.  Half our customers know not Homer, or know him only as you or I know the lost authors of antiquity.  What can be more proper than to mention one or two of those obvious recommendations of his works, which must lead every human creature to desire a nearer acquaintance.—­Believe me, ever faithfully yours,

    W. GODWIN.

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN

    March 11, 1808.

Dear Godwin,—­The giant’s vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you pointed it out.  I have removed the objection.  To the other passages I can find no other objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc.,—­that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things.  If you want a book, which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and wonders.  I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it.  But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous, as to make them rather fine than disgusting.  Who is to read them, I don’t know:  who is it that reads Tales of Terror