The table is laid, and the knives and forks rattling a pleasant note of preparation, as the woman waiter arranges them.

God bless you!  I have hurried through the sheet, and thus pleasantly beguiled what would have been a very unpleasant hour.  We are all well, and your god-daughter has seen a live emperor at Brussels.  I feel the disadvantage of speaking French ill, and understanding it by the ear worse.  Nevertheless, I speak it without remorse, make myself somehow or other understood, and get at what I want to know.  Once more, God bless you, my dear friend.

To HENRY TAYLOR

Anastasius Hope

Keswick, 15 July, 1831.

...  Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all dissuasion, have published?  His notion of immortality and heaven is, that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the living skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell, and Probert, and the twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs, and Genghis Khan, and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors and all his posterity—­yea, all men and all women, and all children that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike—­are all to be put together, and made into one great celestial eternal human being.  He does not seem to have known how nearly this approaches to Swedenborg’s fancy.  I do not like the scheme.  I don’t like the notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe, and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch, and the Irish.  God forbid!  I hope to be I myself; I, in an English heaven, with you yourself—­you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven to me.  God bless you!

TO EDWARD MOXON

Recollections of the Lambs

Keswick, 2 Feb. 1836.

My dear sir,

I have been too closely engaged in clearing off the second volume of Cowper to reply to your inquiries concerning poor Lamb sooner.  His acquaintance with Coleridge began at Christ’s Hospital; Lamb was some two years, I think, his junior.  Whether he was ever one of the Grecians there, might be ascertained, I suppose, by inquiring.  My own impression is, that he was not.  Coleridge introduced me to him in the winter of 1794-5, and to George Dyer also, from whom, if his memory has not failed, you might probably learn more of Lamb’s early history than from any other person.  Lloyd, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt became known to him through their connexion with Coleridge.