Chapter 138

year I fretted myself to a fever with the hauntings of being starved. Those vapours are flown. All the difference I find is that I have no pocket money: that is, I must not pry upon an old book stall, and cull its contents as heretofore, but shoulders of mutton, Whitbread's entire, and Booth's best, abound as formerly.

I don't know whom or how many to send our love to, your household is so frequently divided, but a general health to all that may be fixed or wandering; stars, wherever. We read with pleasure some success (I forget quite what) of one of you at Oxford. Mrs. Monkhouse (... was one of you) sent us a kind letter some [months back], and we had the pleasure to [see] her in tolerable spirits, looking well and kind as in by-gone days.

Do take pen, or put it into goodnatured hands Dorothean or Wordsworthian-female, or Hutchinsonian, to inform us of your present state, or possible proceedings. I am ashamed that this breaking of the long ice should be a letter of business. There is none circum praecordia nostra I swear by the honesty of pedantry, that wil I nil I pushes me upon scraps of Latin. We are yours cordially: CHAS. & MARY LAMB.

September. 1826.

[In this letter, the first to Wordsworth for many months, we have the first mention of Edward Moxon, who was to be so closely associated with Lamb in the years to come. Moxon, a young Yorkshireman, educated at the Green Coat School, was then nearly twenty-five, and was already author of _The Prospect and other Poems_, dedicated to Rogers, who was destined to be a valuable patron. Moxon subsequently became Wordsworth's publisher.

"Constable ... Baldwin." Archibald Constable & Co., Scott's publishers, failed in 1826. Baldwin was the first publisher of the _London Magazine_.

"I pitch Colburn and his magazine." Lamb wrote nothing in the _New Monthly Magazine_ after September, 1826.

I append portions of what seems to be Lamb's first letter to Edward Moxon, obviously written before this date, but not out of place here. The letter seems to have accompanied the proof of an article on Lamb which he had corrected and was returning to Moxon.]