colored house," he calls it, where I and other friends went to dine with
him; but it was too far from London, except for rare visits.--It was
rather before that time that a very clever caricature of him had been
designed and engraved ("scratched on copper," as the artist termed it) by
Mr. Brook Pulham. It is still extant; and although somewhat ludicrous and
hyperbolical in the countenance and outline, it certainly renders a
likeness of Charles Lamb. The nose is monstrous, and the limbs are dwarfed
and attenuated. Lamb himself, in a letter to Bernard Barton (10th August,
1827), adverts to it in these terms: "'Tis a little sixpenny thing--too
like by half--in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid
flattery." Charles's hatred for annuals and albums was continually
breaking out: "I die of albophobia." "I detest to appear in an annual," he
writes; "I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates."
"Coleridge is too deep," again he says, "among the prophets, the gentleman
annuals." "If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost
parts of the earth, there will albums be." To Southey he writes about this
time, "I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius declines
with me; but I get clever." The reader readily appreciates the distinction
which the humorist thus cleverly (more than cleverly) makes. In proof of
his subdued quality, however, under the acrostical tyranny, I quote two
little unpublished specimens addressed to the Misses Locke, whom he had
never seen.

To M. L. [Mary Locke.]

Must I write with pen unwilling,
And describe those graces killing,
Rightly, which I never saw?
Yes--it is the album's law.