Emma knows that I am writing to you, and begs to be remembered to you with thankfulness for your ready contribution.  Her album is filling apace.  But of her contributors one, almost the flower of it, a most amiable young man and late acquaintance of mine, has been carried off by consumption, on return from one of the Azores islands, to which he went with hopes of mastering the disease, came back improved, went back to a most close and confined counting house, and relapsed.  His name was Dibdin, Grandson of the Songster.  You will be glad to hear that Emma, tho’ unknown to you, has given the highest satisfaction in her little place of Governante in a Clergyman’s family, which you may believe by the Parson and his Lady drinking poor Mary’s health on her birthday, tho’ they never saw her, merely because she was a friend of Emma’s, and the Vicar also sent me a brace of partridges.  To get out of home themes, have you seen Southey’s Dialogues?  His lake descriptions, and the account of his Library at Keswick, are very fine.  But he needed not have called up the Ghost of More to hold the conversations with, which might as well have pass’d between A and B, or Caius and Lucius.  It is making too free with a defunct Chancellor and Martyr.

I feel as if I had nothing farther to write about—­O!  I forget the prettiest letter I ever read, that I have received from “Pleasures of Memory” Rogers, in acknowledgment of a Sonnet I sent him on the Loss of his Brother.  It is too long to transcribe, but I hope to shew it you some day, as I hope sometime again to see you, when all of us are well.  Only it ends thus “We were nearly of an age (he was the elder).  He was the only person in the world in whose eyes I always appeared young.”—­

I will now take my leave with assuring you that I am most interested in hoping to hear favorable accounts from you.—­

With kindest regards to A.K. and you

Yours truly, C.L.

["Lucy”—­Lucy Barton.

“Your ready contribution.”  I do not find that Barton ever printed his lines for Emma Isola’s album.

“Dibdin"-John Bates Dibdin died in May, 1828.

Southey’s Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, had just been published.

This was Rogers’ letter:—­

Many, many thanks.  The verses are beautiful.  I need not say with what feelings they were read.  Pray accept the grateful acknowledgments of us all, and believe me when I say that nothing could have been a greater cordial to us in our affliction than such a testimony from such a quarter.  He was —­for none knew him so well—­we were born within a year or two of each other—­a man of a very high mind, and with less disguise than perhaps any that ever lived.  Whatever he was, that we saw.  He stood before his fellow beings (if I may be forgiven for saying so) almost as before his Maker:  and God grant