LET the hungry soul rejoice: there is corn in Egypt.
Whatever thou hast been told to the contrary by designing friends, who perhaps
inquired carelessly, or did not inquire at all, in hope of saving their money,
there is a stock of “Remorse” on hand, enough, as Pople conjectures, for seven years’ consumption; judging
from experience of the last two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit of
sound literature, that the best books do not always go off best. Inquire in
seven years’ time for the “Rokebys” and the “Laras,” and where shall they be found?—fluttering
fragmentally in
| 1814 | MADAME DE STAEL | 441 |
Thy caterer Price was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee, like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander.
Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence-Pountney-Lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Alemagne, like thine, dear mystic.
I have been reading Madame
Stael on
Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if “Faust” be no better than in her
abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the
language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies! But I will not forget to look
for Proclus. It is a kind of book which
when one meets with it one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet I have
some bastard kind of recollection that somewhere, some time ago, upon some
stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, 205-270 a.d.,
Neoplatonist, or Saint Augustine’s
“City of God.” So
little do some folks value, what to others, sc. to
you, “well used,” had been the “Pledge of
Immortality.” Bishop Bruno
I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such “a
Hare” as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of
fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the
Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May he lend the
third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who
shall lose it, and so spoil the publication; and may his friend find it and
send it him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced
the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by Reviewers, and the devil
jug him! So I think I have answered all the questions except about Morgan’s cos-lettuces. The first
personal peculiarity I ever observed of him (all worthy souls are subject to
’em) was a particular kind of rabbit-like delight in munching salads with
oil without vinegar after dinner—a steady contemplative browsing on them—didst
never take note of it? Canst think of
| 442 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | August |
