But I shall omit in my own copy the one stanza which alludes to Lord B.—­I suppose.  It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling.  Cannot we think of Burns, or Thompson, without sullying the thought with a reflection out of place upon Lord Rochester?  These verses might have been inscribed upon a tomb; are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.  Besides, there is a quotation in it, always bad in verse; seldom advisable in prose.

I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall try them.  Omitting that stanza, a very little alteration is want’g in the beginn’g of the next.  You see, I use freedom.  How happily (I flatter not!) you have bro’t in his subjects; and, (I suppose) his favorite measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the Farmer’s Boy.  He dined with me once, and his manners took me exceedingly.

I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence.  I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly.  How could I remain all my life a lodger!  My garden thrives (I am told) tho’ I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots.  But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.

Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey.  Cannot you supply it by circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the Horkey.  But Horkey choaks me in the Text.  It raises crowds of mean associations, Hawking and sp-----g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin.  The sound is every thing, in such dulcet modulations ’specially.  I like

Gilbert Meldrum’s sterner tones,

without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is.  You have slipt in your rhymes as if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally.  There’s a vile phrase.

Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets—­[to] have ’em ready with Southey’s Book of the Church?  I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.

Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings off.  And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere.  I read or walk.  If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it is but half a one.  Believe me tho’ entirely yours C.L.

[Barton’s “Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet” (who died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils, 1824.  This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:—­

        It is not quaint and local terms
          Besprinkled o’er thy rustic lay,
        Though well such dialect confirms
          Its power unletter’d minds to sway,
        It is not these that most display
          Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,—­
        Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,
          But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.