refer to the mechanical part only) the ‘Memoir of Charles Lamb.’  It is not my book,—­i.e. not my property,—­but one which I was hired to write, and it forms my last earnings.  You will have heard of the book (perhaps seen it) some time since.  It has been very well received.  I would not have engaged myself on anything else, but I had great regard for Charles Lamb, and so (somehow or other) I have contrived to reach the end.

“I have already (long ago) written something about Hazlitt, but I have received more than one application for it, in case I can manage to complete my essay.  As in the case of Lamb, I am really the only person living who knew much about his daily life.  I have not, however, quite the same incentive to carry me on.  Indeed, I am not certain that I should be able to travel to the real Finis.

    “My wife is very grateful for the copies of my dear Adelaide’s poems
    which you sent her.  She appears surprised to hear that I have not
    transmitted her thanks to you before.

“We get the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ regularly.  I need not tell you how much better the poetry is than at its commencement.  Very good is ‘Released,’ in the July number, and several of the stories; but they are in London, and I cannot particularize them.

“We were very much pleased with Colonel Holmes, the son of your friend and contributor.  He seems a very intelligent, modest young man; as little military as need be, and, like Coriolanus, not baring his wounds (if he has any) for public gaze.  When you see Dr. Holmes, pray tell him how much I and my wife liked his son.

“We are at the present moment rusticating at Malvern Wells.  We are on the side of a great hill (which you would call small in America), and our intercourse is only with the flowers and bees and swallows of the season.  Sometimes we encounter a wasp, which I suppose comes from over seas!

“The Storys are living two or three miles off, and called upon us a few days ago.  You have not seen his Sibyl, which I think very fine, and as containing a very great future.  But the young poets generally disappoint us, and are too content with startling us into admiration of their first works, and then go to sleep.

“I wish that I had, when younger, made more notes about my contemporaries; for, being of no faction in politics, it happens that I have known far more literary men than any other person of my time.  In counting up the names of persons known to me who were, in some way or other, connected with literature, I reckoned up more than one hundred.  But then I have had more than sixty years to do this in.  My first acquaintance of this sort was Bowles, the poet.  This was about 1805.

    “Although I can scarcely write, I am able to say, in conclusion,
    that I am

    “Very sincerely yours,