"Promised a play, and dwindled to a farce."
Coleridge is better (was, at least, a few weeks since) than he has been for years. His accomplishing his book at last has been a source of vigour to him. We are on a half visit to his friend Allsop, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Enfield, but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all round your Wrekin.
[In the letter to Barton of March 20, 1826, Lamb continues or amplifies his remarks on his own letter-writing habits.
"Capillarians." The _New English Dictionary_ gives Lamb's word in this connection as its sole example, meaning without stem.
"The poem"--Southey's _Tale of Paraguay_, 1825, which begins with an address to Jenner, the physiologist:--
Jenner! for ever shall thy honour'd name,
Edith! ten years are number'd, since the day.
Edith Southey was born in 1804. The dedication was dated 1814.
John May was Southey's friend and correspondent. It was not he that had died.
"The Vesper Bell"--"The Chapel Bell," which was not in the _Annual Anthology_, but in Southey's _Poems_, 1797. Dear George would perhaps be Burnett, who was at Oxford with Southey when the verses were written.
"The compliment to the translatress." Southey took his _Tale of Paraguay_ from Dobrizhoffer's _History of the Abipones_, which his niece, Sara Coleridge, had translated. Southey remarks in the poem that could Dobrizhoffer have foreseen by whom his words were to be turned into English, he would have been as pleased as when he won the ear of the Empress Queen.
"Landor's ... allegorising." Landor, in the conversation between "Peter Leopold and the President du Paty," makes President du Paty say that Cervantes had deeper purpose than the satirising of knight-errants, Don Quixote standing for the Emperor Charles V. and Sancho Panza symbolising the people. Southey quoted the passage in the Notes to the Proem. Lamb's _Elia_ essay on the "Defect of Imagination" (see Vol. II.) amplifies this criticism of Don Quixote.