We are setting out to walk to Enfield after our Beans and Bacon, which are just smoking.

2d day, 3d month of my Hegira or Flight from Leadenhall.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) — Part 123

["To Allsop's." Allsop says in his _Letters... of Coleridge_ that he and the Lambs were housemates for a long time.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) — Part 123

"Vide Lond. Mag. for July"--where the _Elia_ essay "The Convalescent" was printed.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) — Part 123

"The Odes"--_Odes and Addresses to Great People, 1825._ Coleridge after reading the book had written to Lamb as follows (the letter is printed by Hood):--

MY DEAR CHARLES,--This afternoon, a little, thin, mean-looking sort of a foolscap, sub-octavo of poems, printed on very dingy outsides, lay on the table, which the cover informed me was circulating in our book-club, so very Grub-Streetish in all its appearance, internal as well as external, that I cannot explain by what accident of impulse (assuredly there was no _motive_ in play) I came to look into it. Least of all, the title, Odes and Addresses to Great Men, which connected itself in my head with Rejected Addresses, and all the Smith and Theodore Hook squad. But, my dear Charles, it was certainly written by you, or under you, or _una eum_ you. I know none of your frequent visitors capacious and assimilative enough of your converse to have reproduced you so honestly, supposing you had left yourself in pledge in his lock-up house. Gillman, to whom I read the spirited parody on the introduction to Peter Bell, the Ode to the Great Unknown, and to Mrs. Fry; he speaks doubtfully of Reynolds and Hood. But here come Irving and Basil Montagu.

_Thursday night 10 o'clock_.--No! Charles, it is _you_. I have read them over again, and I understand why you have _anon'd_ the book. The puns are nine in ten good--many excellent --the Newgatory transcendent. And then the _exemplum sine exemplo_ of a volume of personalities, and contemporaneities, without a single line that could inflict the infinitesimal of an unpleasance on any man in his senses: saving and except perhaps in the envy-addled brain of the despiser of your _Lays_. If not a triumph over him, it is at least an _ovation_. Then, moreover, and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self, who is there but you who can write the musical lines and stanzas that are intermixed?