LETTER 222

CHARLES LAMB TO Miss HUTCHINSON (_Added to same letter_)

Dear Miss Hutchinson, I subscribe most willingly to all my sister says of her Enjoyment at Cambridge. She was in silent raptures all the while _there_ and came home riding thro' the air (her 1st long outside journey) triumphing as if she had been _graduated_. I remember one foolish-pretty expression she made use of, "Bless the little churches how pretty they are," as those symbols of civilized life opened upon her view one after the other on this side Cambridge. You cannot proceed a mile without starting a steeple, with its little patch of villagery round it, enverduring the waste. I don't know how you will pardon part of her letter being a transcript, but writing to another Lady first (probably as the _easiest task_ *) it was unnatural not to give you an acco't of what had so freshly delighted her, and would have been a piece of transcendant rhetorick (above her modesty) to have given two different accounts of a simple and univocal pleasure. Bless me how learned I write! but I always forget myself when I write to Ladies. One cannot tame one's erudition down to their merely English apprehensions. But this and all other faults you will excuse from yours truly

C. LAMB.

Our kindest loves to Joanna, if she will accept it from us who are merely NOMINAL to her, and to the child and child's parent. Yours again

C. L.

[_Mary Lamb adds this footnote:_--]

* "_Easiest Task_." Not the true reason, but Charles had so connected Coleridge & Cambridge in my mind, by talking so much of him there, and a letter coming so fresh from _him_, in a manner _that was the reason_ I wrote to them first. I make this apology perhaps quite unnecessarily, but I am of a very jealous temper myself, and more than once recollect having been offended at seeing kind expressions which had particularly pleased me in a friend's letter repeated word for word to another--Farewell once more.

[I have no idea why this charming letter was held back when Talfourd copied the Lamb-Wordsworth correspondence. The name of the young man who showed the Lambs such courtesy is not known.

Coleridge's literary plans were destined to change. The _Biographia Literaria_ was published alone in 1817, and _Sibylline Leaves_ alone later in the same year.--"Remorse" had been acted at Calne in June for the second time, a previous visit having been paid in 1813. Coleridge gave the manager a "flaming testimonial."--Lady Beaumont was the wife of Sir George Beaumont.

"Oliver Cromwell." The portrait by Cooper at Sidney Sussex College.

F.W. Franklin was with Lamb at Christ's Hospital. Afterwards he became Master of the Blue Coat School at Hertford. He is mentioned in the _Elia_ essay on Christ's Hospital.]