DEAR Sir—I have again been reading your stanzas on
Bloomfield, which are the most
appropriate that can be imagined, sweet with Doric delicacy. I like that
| 622 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Sept. |
Our more chaste Theocritus— |
Words phrases fashions pass away; But Truth and nature live through all. |
I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall try them. Omitting that stanza, a very little alteration is wantg in the beginng of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily (I flatter not!) you have brot in his subjects; and, (I suppose) his favorite measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the Farmer’s Boy. He dined with me once, and his manners took me exceedingly.
I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told) tho’ I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden’s a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.
Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text.
It raises crowds of mean associations, Hawking and sp——g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is every thing, in such dulcet modulations ’specially. I like
Gilbert Meldrum’s sterner
tones, |
Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets—[to] have ’em ready with Southey’s Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.
Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho’ entirely yours
