TO HIS BROTHER
[Sidenote:  Keats]

The thought of your little girl puts me in mind of a thing I heard Mr. Lamb say.  A child in arms was passing by his chair towards the mother in the nurse’s arms.  Lamb took hold of the long-clothes, saying, “Where, God bless me, where does it leave off?”

LAMB’S TASK
[Sidenote:  Charles Lamb]

In those days every morning paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs.  Sixpence a joke—­and it was thought pretty high too—­was Dan Stuart’s settled remuneration in these cases.  The chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, dress, furnished the material.  The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines.  Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant.

A fashion of flesh-, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming in at this juncture, when we were on our probation for the place of Chief Jester to S——­’s paper, established our reputation in that line.  We were pronounced a “capital hand.”  Oh the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon “many waters.”  Then there was the collateral topic of ankles.  What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something “not quite proper,” while, like a skilful posture-maker, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair’s-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where “both seem either”; a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the play, still putting off his expectant auditory with “Whoop, do me no harm, good man!” But, above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, allusively to the flight of Astrae—­ultima Coelestum terras reliquit—­we pronounced—­in reference to the stockings still—­that Modesty taking her final leave of Mortals, her last blush was visible in her ascent to the Heavens by the tract of the glowing instep. This might be called the crowning conceit; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days.

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away; as did the transient mode which had so favoured us.  The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon.  Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings.