I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic.  I can do the dialogue commey fo:  but the damned plot—­I believe I must omit it altogether.  The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde Park review.  The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language plain as his spouse.  The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the “Evangely.”  I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.

I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book:  I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles:  to lay in the dead colours,—­I’d Titianesque ’em up:  to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I’d draw the waters down:  to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out:  to bring my personae on and off like a Beau Nash; and I’d Frankenstein them there:  to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.

I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governess-ship; which we see no prospect of her getting.  ’Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon.  Sisyphus—­his labours were as nothing to it.

Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray.  Her prepositions are suppositions; her conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her interjections are purely English “Ah!” and “Oh!” with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine.  As I say to her, ass in praesenti rarely makes a wise man in futuro.

But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.

Good-by!  Mary’s love.

Yours truly, C. LAMB.

[This is the second letter to Mrs. Shelley, nee Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the widow of the poet and the author of Frankenstein.  She had been living in England since 1823; and in 1826 had issued anonymously The Last Man.  That she kept much in touch with the Lambs’ affairs we know by her letters to Leigh Hunt.

Major Butterworth has kindly supplied me with a copy of her letter to
Mary Lamb which called forth Lamb’s reply.  It runs thus:—­

Kentish Town, 22 July, 1827.

My dear Miss Lamb,

You have been long at Enfield—­I hardly know yet whether you are returned—­and I quit town so very soon that I have not time to—­as I exceedingly wish—­call on you before I go.  Nevertheless believe (if such familiar expression be not unmeet from me) that I love you with all my heart—­gratefully and sincerely—­and that when I return I shall seek you with, I hope, not too much zeal—­but it will be with great eagerness.