Dear Clare, I thank you heartily for your present.  I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the country.  The quantity of your observation has astonished me.  What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude.  In some of your story telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me.  I think you are too profuse with them.  In poetry slang [underlined] of every kind is to be avoided.  There is a rustick Cockneyism as little pleasing as ours of London.  Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone.  The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found in Shenstones.  Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been better, if he had used quite the Goody’s own language?  Now and then a home rusticism is fresh & startling, but where nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor.  It may make people [crossed out] folks smile and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be.  Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns [underlined].

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours.  They are of all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night.  Pray give them a place on your shelf.  Pray accept a little volume, of which I have duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your welcome presents—­

     I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for
     August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs.  The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted.  Do look about for them.  Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter.  The four [crossed out] fore quarters are not so good.  She may let them hop off by themselves.  Yours sincerely, Cha^s Lamb.

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

“Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick.”  Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb’s contributions to literature.  His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, “will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in few things finer.”