Yours affectionately,
MARY LAMB.
[John Payne Collier remarks: "Southey and Coleridge, as is well known, married two sisters of the name of Fricker. I never saw either of them, but a third sister settled as a mantua-maker in London, and for some years she worked for my mother and her daughters. She was an intelligent woman, but by no means above her business, though she was fond of talking of her two poet-married relations. She was introduced to my mother by the following note from Mary Lamb, who always spoke of my sisters as her girls."
Mary Lamb had herself worked as a mantua-maker for some years previous to the autumn of 1796.]
LETTER 204
CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT
[P.M. (? Feb.), 1814.]
Sir—Your explanation is perfectly pleasant to me, and I accede to your proposal most willingly.
As I began with the beginning of this month, I will if you please call upon you for your part of the engagement (supposing I shall have performed mine) on the 1st of March next, and thence forward if it suit you quarterly.—You will occasionally wink at BRISKETS & VEINY PIECES.
Your hble. Svt.
C. LAMB.
Saturday.
[John Scott (1783-1821) we shall meet later, in 1820, in connection with the London Magazine, which he edited until the fatal termination of his quarrel with Blackwood's. Scott had just become editor of The Champion.
Lamb's only contribution to The Champion under Scott, which can be identified, is the essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors," but there is little doubt that he supplied many of the extracts from old authors which were printed from time to time, and possibly one or two comic letters also. See the letter of Dec. 12, 1814.]