DEAR Friends,—It is with infinite regret I inform you that the pleasing privilege of receiving letters, by which I have for these twenty years gratified my friends and abused the liberality of the Company trading to the Orient, is now at an end. A cruel edict of the Directors has swept it away altogether. The devil sweep away their patronage also. Rascals who think nothing of sponging upon their employers for their Venison and Turtle and Burgundy five days in a week, to the tune of five thousand pounds in a year, now find out that the profits of trade will not allow the innocent communication of thought between their underlings and their friends in distant provinces to proceed untaxed, thus withering up the heart of friendship and making the news of a friend’s good health worse than indifferent, as tidings to be deprecated as bringing with it ungracious expenses. Adieu, gentle correspondence, kindly conveyance of soul, interchange of love, of opinions, of puns and what not! Henceforth a friend that does not stand in visible or palpable distance to me, is nothing to me. They have not left to the bosom of friendship even that cheap intercourse of sentiment the twopenny medium. The upshot is, you must not direct any more letters through me. To me you may annually, or biennially, transmit a brief account of your goings on [on] a single sheet, from which after I have deducted as much as the postage comes to, the remainder will be pure pleasure. But no more of those pretty commissions and counter commissions, orders and revoking of orders, obscure messages and obscurer explanations, by which the intellects of Marshall and Fanny used to be kept in a pleasing perplexity, at the moderate rate of six or seven shillings a week. In short, you must use me no longer as a go-between. Henceforth I write up no thoroughfare.
Well, and how far is Saint Valery from Paris; and do you get
wine and walnuts tolerable; and the vintage, does it suffer from the wet? I
take it, the wine of this season will be all wine and water; and have you any
plays and green rooms, and Fanny Kellies
to chat with of an evening; and is the air purer than the old gravel pits, and
the bread so much whiter, as they say? Lord, what things you see that travel! I
dare say the people are all French wherever you go. What an overwhelming effect
that must have! I have stood one of ’em at a time, but two I generally
found overpowering,
| 504 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Oct. |
I suppose you know we’ve left the Temple pro tempore. By the way, this conduct has caused strange
surmises in a good lady of our acquaintance. She lately sent for a young
gentleman of the India House, who lives opposite her, at Monroe’s, the
flute shop in Skinner Street, Snow Hill,—I mention no name, you shall never get
out of me what lady I mean,—on purpose to ask all he knew about us. I had
previously introduced him to her whist-table. Her inquiries embraced every
possible thing that could be known of me, how I stood in the India house, what
was the amount of my salary, what it was likely to be hereafter, whether I was
thought to be clever in business, why I had taken country lodgings, why at
Kingsland in particular, had I friends in that road, was anybody expected to
visit me, did I wish for visitors, would an unexpected call be gratifying or
not, would it be better if she sent beforehand, did anybody come to see me,
wasn’t there a gentleman of the name of Morgan, did he know him, didn’t he come to see me, did he
know how Mr. Morgan lived, she never could make out how
they were maintained, was it true that he lived out of the profits of a
linendraper’s shop in Bishopsgate Street (there she was a little right,
and a little wrong—M. is a gentleman tobacconist); in
short, she multiplied demands upon him till my friend, who is neither
over-modest nor nervous, declared he quite shuddered. After laying as bare to
her curiosity as an anatomy he trembled to think what she would ask next. My
pursuits, inclinations, aversions, attachments (some, my dear friends, of a
most delicate nature), she lugged ’em out of him, or would, had he been
privy to them, as you pluck a horse-bean from its iron stem, not as such tender
rosebuds should be pulled. The fact is I am come to Kingsland, and that is the
real truth of the matter, and nobody but yourselves should have extorted such a
confession from me. I suppose you have seen by the Papers that Manning is arrived in England. He expressed
some mortifications at not finding Mrs.
Kenney in England. He looks a good deal sunburnt, and is got a
little reserved, but I hope it will wear off. You will see by the Papers also
that Dawe is knighted. He has been
painting the Princess of Coborg and her
husband. This is all the news I could think of. Write to
us, but not by us, for I have near ten correspondents of
this latter description, and one or other comes pouring in every day, till my
purse strings and heart strings crack. Bad habits are not broken at once. I
| 1817 | THE KENNEYS | 505 |
