An answer is requested.
DEAR D.—I
have observed that a Letter is never more acceptable than when received upon a
rainy day, especially a rainy Sunday; which moves me to send you somewhat,
however short. This will find you sitting after Breakfast, which you will have
prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor handmaid that has the
reversion of the Tea Leaves; making two nibbles of your last morsel of stale roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the
Sabbath), and reluctantly coming to an end, because when that is done, what can
you do till dinner? You cannot go to the Beach, for the rain is drowning the
sea, turning rank Thetis fresh, taking the
brine out of Neptune’s pickles, while
mermaids sit upon rocks with umbrellas, their ivory combs sheathed for spoiling
in the wet of waters foreign to them. You cannot go to the library, for
it’s shut. You are not religious enough to go to church. O it is worth
while to cultivate piety to the gods, to have something to fill the heart up on
a wet Sunday! You cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with
moths in the Ancient Jewry. You cannot play at draughts, for there is none to
play with you, and besides there is not a draught board in the house. You
cannot go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot look in to the shops,
their backs are shut upon you. You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good
reading for the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot while away an hour
with a friend, for you have no friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert
yourself with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot
bear the chiming of Bells, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no
visitant. You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow’s
letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials on the
mantlepiece with any hope of making a variation in their numbers. You have
counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and deliberately curse
your hard exile from all familiar sights and sounds. Old
Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly would just now
be as good to you as Grimaldi. Any thing
to deliver you from this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are too ill to shake
it off: not ill enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The
Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: ’tis to
have Thirty
| 716 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Sept. |
P.S.—We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: tomorrow (that is, today), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean to be.
