ones; some friends, and they pretty regular correspondents, with as much
wit as wisdom as will eat their bread and cheese together under a poor
roof without quarrelling; as much goodness as will earn heaven! Here I
must leave off, my benedictory powers failing me. I could _curse_ the
sheet full; so much stronger is corruption than grace in the Natural
Man.

And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest face-to-face
countenance again--your fine _dogmatical sceptical_ face, by
punch-light? O! one glimpse of the human face, and shake of the human
hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin correspondence--yea,
of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of
sensibility from Madame Sevigne and Balzac (observe my Larning!) to
Sterne and Shenstone.

Coleridge is settled with his wife and the young philosopher at Keswick
with the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of
lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes
no little excitement in the _literary world_. George Dyer too, that
good-natured heathen, is more than nine months gone with his twin
volumes of ode, pastoral, sonnet, elegy, Spenserian, Horatian,
Akensidish, and Masonic verse--Clio prosper the birth! it will be twelve
shillings out of somebody's pocket. I find he means to exclude "personal
satire," so it appears by his truly original advertisement. Well, God
put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come in shoals and
subscribe to his poems, for He never put a kinder heart into flesh of
man than George Dyer's!

Now farewell: for dinner is at hand. C. L.