So Shakspeare, Otway, and I believe Rowe, to whom he was naturally directed by Johnson's Lives, and these not read lately, are to stand him in stead of a general knowledge of the subject. God bless his dear absurd head!
By the by, did I not write you a letter with something about an invitation in it?—but let that pass; I suppose it is not agreeable.
N.B. It would not be amiss if you were to accompany your present with a dissertation on negative quantities.
C. L.
[Mr. Melmoth. A translation of the Letters of Pliny the Younger was made by William Melmoth in 1746.
Trismegistus—thrice greatest—was the term applied to Hermes, the Egyptian philosopher. Manning had written An Introduction to Arithmetic and Algebra, 1796, 1798.
William Frend (1757-1841), the mathematician and Unitarian, who had been prosecuted in the Vice-Chancellor's Court at Cambridge for a tract entitled "Peace and Union Recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans," in which he attacked much of the Liturgy of the Church of England. He was found guilty and banished from the University of Cambridge. He had been a friend of Robert Robinson, whose life Dyer wrote, and remained a friend of Dyer to the end of his life. Coleridge had been among the undergraduates who supported Frend at his trial.
"…'s brain." In a later letter Lamb uses Judge Park's wig, when his head is in it, as a simile for emptiness.]