affectionate remembrance of his old friendliness, and an earnest wish to
resume our intercourse. In this I am serious. I cannot recommend him to
your society, because I am afraid whether he be quite worthy of it. But
I have no right to dismiss him from _my_ regard. He was at one time, and
in the worst of times, my own familiar friend, and great comfort to me
then. I have known him to play at cards with my father, meal-times
excepted, literally all day long, in long days too, to save me from
being teased by the old man, when I was not able to bear it.

God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey.

C. L.

[Peter Pindar (Dr. John Wolcot) has an ode "To a Fly, taken out of a
Bowl of Punch." He also wrote "The Lousiad."

"Poor earth-born companions." From Burns' "Lines to a Mouse," 2nd
Stanza, line 5.

"Toads are made to fly." Filliping the toad was an old pastime. A toad
was placed on one end of a piece of wood, laid crosswise over a stone.
The other end was struck with a beetle (_i.e._, a mallet), and the toad
flew into the air. Falstaff says: "Fillip me with a three-man beetle."
As to worms and fishermen, the late Mrs. Coe, who as a girl had known
Lamb at Widford, told me that he could rarely, if ever, be tempted to
join the anglers. Affixing the worm was too much for him. "Barbarous,
barbarous," he used to say.

Lamb's project for a series of animal poems has to some extent been
carried out by a living poet, Mr. A. C. Benson. Neither Lamb nor Southey