in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my
lumber-room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled
Tyrrell's Bibliotheca Politica, which you used to learn your politics
out of when you wrote for the Post, _mutatis mutandis, i.e._, applying
past inferences to modern _data_. I retain that, because I am sensible I
am very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up--don't be
angry, waste paper has risen forty per cent., and I can't afford to buy
it--all Buonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one
or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the
flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking.
Mary says you will be in a damned passion about them when you come to
miss them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de
Chartis Amissis five times over after phlebotomising,--'tis Burton's
recipe--and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. I have just
heard that Mrs. Lloyd is delivered of a fine boy, and mother and boy are
doing well. Fie on sluggards, what is thy Sara doing? Sara is obscure.
Am I to understand by her letter, that she sends a _kiss_ to Eliza
Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the
superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical--she proposes writing
my name _Lamb_? Lambe is quite enough. I have had the Anthology, and
like only one thing in it, _Lewti_; but of that the last stanza is
detestable, the rest most exquisite!--the epithet _enviable_ would dash
the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make
me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it
in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see
you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to
feed upon such epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is
equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very
quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My
_sentiment_ is long since vanished. I hope my _virtues_ have done