DEAR Southey,—My friend Hone, whom
you would like for a friend, I found deeply impressed
with your generous notice of him in your beautiful “Life of Bunyan,” which I am just now
full of. He has written to you for leave to publish a certain good-natured
letter. I write not this to enforce his request, for we are fully aware that
the refusal of such publication would be quite consistent with all that is good
in your character. Neither he nor
| 848 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | May |
Our object is to open a subscription, which my friends of the “Times” are most willing to forward for him, but think that a leave from you to publish would aid it.
But not an atom of respect or kindness will or shall it abate in either of us if you decline it. Have this strongly in your mind.
Those “Every-Day” and “Table” Books will be a treasure a hundred years hence; but they have failed to make Hone’s fortune.
Here his wife and all his children are about me, gaping for coffee customers; but how should they come in, seeing no pot boiling!
Enough of Hone. I saw Coleridge a day or two since. He has had some severe attack, not paralytic; but, if I had not heard of it, I should not have found it out. He looks, and especially speaks, strong. How are all the Wordsworths and all the Southeys? whom I am obliged to you if you have not brought up haters of the name of
P.S.—I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius (such as I had) declines with me, but I get clever. Do you know anybody that wants charades, or such things, for Albums? I do ’em at so much a sheet. Perhaps an epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse. I pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity; but ’tis, with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it “to order.”
Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas Fur, rapiens, spolians, quod mihi, quod-que
tibi, Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, Meum-que, Suum-que; Omne suum est: tandem Cui-que Suum tribuit. Dat laqueo collum; vestes, vah! carnifici dat; Sese Diabolo: sic bene: Cuique Suum. |
I write from Hone’s, therefore Mary cannot send her love to Mrs. Southey, but I do.
