I wishd for you yesterday.  I dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rogers, and Tom Moore—­half the Poetry of England constellated and clustered in Gloster Place!  It was a delightful Even!  Coleridge was in his finest vein of talk, had all the talk, and let ’em talk as evilly as they do of the envy of Poets, I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener.  The Muses were dumb, while Apollo lectured on his and their fine Art.  It is a lie that Poets are envious, I have known the best of them, and can speak to it, that they give each other their merits, and are the kindest critics as well as best authors.  I am scribbling a muddy epistle with an aking head, for we did not quaff Hippocrene last night.  Many, it was Hippocras rather.  Pray accept this as a letter in the mean time, and do me the favor to mention my respects to Mr. Mitford, who is so good as to entertain good thoughts of Elia, but don’t show this almost impertinent scrawl.  I will write more respectfully next time, for believe me, if not in words, in feelings, yours most so.

["Your poem.”  Barton’s poem was entitled “A Poet’s Thanks,” and was printed in the London Magazine for April, 1823, the same number that contained Lamb’s article on Ritson and Scott.  It is one of his best poems, an expression of contentment in simplicity.  The “Letter to an Old Gentleman,” a parody of De Quincey’s series of “Letters to a Young Gentleman” in the London Magazine, was not published until January, 1825.  Scott was John Scott of Amwell (Barton’s predecessor as the Quaker poet), who had written a rather foolish book of prose, Critical Essays on the English Poets.  Ritson was Joseph Ritson, the critic and antiquarian.  See Vol.  I. of the present edition for the essay.  Barton seems to have suggested to Lamb that he should write an essay around the poem “A Poet’s Thanks.”  Mitford’s sonnet, which was printed in the London Magazine for June, 1823, was addressed commiseratingly to Bernard Barton.  It began:—­

What to thy broken Spirit can atone,
Unhappy victim of the Tyrant’s fears;

and continued in the same strain, the point being that Barton was the victim of his Quaker employers, who made him “prisoner at once and slave.”  Lamb’s previous letter shows us that Barton was being worked from nine till nine, and we must suppose also that an objection to his poetical exercises had been lodged or suggested.  The matter righted itself in time.

“I dined in Parnassus.”  This dinner, at Thomas Monkhouse’s, No. 34 Gloucester Place, is described both by Moore and by Crabb Robinson, who was present.  Moore wrote in his Journal:—­

“Dined at Mr. Monkhouse’s (a gentleman I had never seen before) on Wordsworth’s invitation, who lives there whenever he comes to town.  A singular party.  Coleridge, Rogers, Wordsworth and wife, Charles Lamb (the hero at present of the London Magazine), and his sister (the poor woman who went mad in a diligence on the way to Paris), and a Mr. Robinson, one of the minora sidera of this constellation of the Lakes; the host himself, a Maecenas of the school, contributing nothing but good dinners and silence.  Charles Lamb, a clever fellow, certainly, but full of villainous and abortive puns, which he miscarries of every minute.  Some excellent things, however, have come from him.”