Mark, he has never read any of these bucks, but is impatient till he
reads them _all_ at the Doctor's suggestion. Poor Dyer! his friends
should be careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable
matter.

Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access
of new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first
(upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old,
safe, familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his
brain)--Gray, Akenside and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often
as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.

God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!

All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight!

Avaunt friendship and all memory of absent friends!

C. LAMB.

["Divine spirit of gravy." This passage is the first of Lamb's outbursts
of gustatory ecstasy, afterwards to become frequent in his writings.

Here should come a letter, dated October 9, 1800, in the richest spirit
of comedy, describing to Coleridge an evening with George Dyer and the
Cottles after the death of their brother Amos; and how Lamb, by praising
Joseph Cottle's poem, drew away that good man's thoughts from his grief.
"Joseph, who till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the
fireplace, wheeled about, and with great difficulty of body shifted the
same round to the corner of a table where I was sitting, and first