as they spring up from some living and worthy occasion.

I look forward with great pleasure to the performance of your promise,
that we should meet in London early in the ensuing year. The century
must needs commence auspiciously for me, that brings with it Manning's
friendship as an earnest of its after gifts.

I should have written before, but for a troublesome inflammation in one
of my eyes, brought on by night travelling with the coach windows
sometimes up.

What more I have to say shall be reserved for a letter to Lloyd. I must
not prove tedious to you in my first outset, lest I should affright you
by my ill-judged loquacity. I am, yours most sincerely, C. LAMB.

[This is the first letter that has been preserved in the correspondence
between Lamb and Manning. Lamb first met Manning at Cambridge, in the
autumn of 1799, when on a visit to Charles Lloyd. Much of Manning's
history will be unfolded as the letters proceed, but here it should be
stated that he was born on November 8, 1772, and was thus a little more
than two years older than Lamb. He was at this time acting as private
tutor in mathematics at Cambridge, among his pupils being Charles Lloyd,
of Caius, Manning's own college. Manning, however, did not take his
degree, owing to an objection to oaths and tests.

Lamb's reference to the beginning of the century shows that he shared
with many other non-mathematically-minded persons the belief that the
century begins with the hundredth, and not the hundred and first, year.
He says of Manning, in the _Elia_ essay "The Old and the New
Schoolmaster": "My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I