“. . . . . The books arrived a few days since; this I believe you have already been told. But I have not told you how much amusement Cuthbert afforded us on this occasion. The whole business of transcribing, receiving, correcting, and returning proof sheets (to say nothing of the original composition), has been so well concealed from him, that whenever he knows the truth it will be difficult for him to conceive how he can possibly have been kept in ignorance. From this ignorance we anticipated much entertainment, and have not been disappointed, When I went down to dinner he told me with great glee, that the book which had come that morning was one of the queerest he had ever seen. He had only looked into it, but he had seen that there was one chapter without a beginning, and another about Aballiboozonorribang (for so he had got the word), which whether it was something to eat, or whether it was the thing in the title-page he could not tell; for in one place it was called the sign of the book, and in another you were told to eat beans if you liked, but to abstain from Aballiboozo.
“At tea he was full of the chapter about the warts and
the moonshine, and all the philosophers in the dictionary. At supper he was
open-mouthed about the sirloin of a king, and the schoolmaster’s rump; he
would read to me about the lost tribes of Israel;
| Ætat. 58. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 229 |
“To-day he says that there is more sense in the second volume, but he does not like it so well as the first. That there is not much in the book about the Doctor; and, indeed, he does not know what it is about, except that it is about everything else; that it was very proper to put &c. in the title-page; that the author, whoever he is, must be a clever man, and he should not wonder if it proved to be Charles Lamb. You may imagine how heartily we have enjoyed all this.
“A letter from Wordsworth tells us that the book has just arrived there, and that one of W.’s nephews (a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a very clever and promising person,) had got hold of it, was laughing while he looked over the contents, and had just declared that the man who wrote the book must be mad.
“God bless you, my dear Grosvenor!
