After all, Bonaparte is a fine fellow, as my barber says, and I should not mind standing bareheaded at his table to do him service in his fall. They should have given him Hampton Court or Kensington, with a tether extending forty miles round London. Qu. Would not the people have ejected the Brunswicks some day in his favour? Well, we shall see.
C. LAMB.
["Father Pardo." I have not traced this fat friar.
"The excellent Dodd." The Rev. William Dodd (1729-1777), compiler of The Beauties of Shakespeare, was hanged for forgery in 1777, when Lamb was two years old. The case caused immense public interest.
"Buonaparte." Waterloo had been fought on June 18.
"Your boute-feu." The bonfire in honour of Waterloo flamed on Skiddaw on
August 21. See Southey's description in his letter to his brother,
August 23, 1815 (Life and Correspondence, Vol. IV., page 120).
"Poet Settle." Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) was chief organiser of the procession on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's birthday in 1680, when the Pope was burned in effigy.
Hartley Coleridge, now almost nineteen, after having been to school at Ambleside, had been sent to Oxford through the instrumentality of his uncle, Southey. At the time of Lamb's letter he was staying at Calne with his father. Mr. Betty was the Young Roscius, whom we have already seen, who, after retiring from the Phenomenon stage of his career in 1808, had since been to school and to Cambridge upon his earnings, and had now become an adult actor. Poole was Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, whom we have seen: Coleridge's old and very sensible friend. Tobin would probably be James Webbe Tobin, the brother of the dramatist. He had died in 1814.
"I am going to stand godfather." To what child I do not know.
"Louis the Desirable"—Louis XVIII., styled by the Royalists "Le
Desiré.">[