I have but one holiday, which is Christmas-day itself nakedly: no pretty garnish and fringes of St. John's day, Holy Innocents &c., that used to bestud it all around in the calendar. Improbe labor! I write six hours every day in this candle-light fog-den at Leadheall.
[Footnote 1: Canon Ainger supplies the four missing words: "which has utterly failed.">[
[The ticket was for a new course of lectures, either on the History of
Philosophy, or Six Plays of Shakespeare, both of which began in
December, 1818, and continued into 1819.
Kenney's new farce was "A Word for the Ladies," produced at Covent
Garden on December 17.
"To catch a skirt of the old out-goer." A reference to Coleridge's line—
I saw the skirts of the departing year.
Somewhere at this point should come a delightful letter from Lamb to John Chambers. John Chambers was the brother of Charles Chambers. He was a colleague of Lamb's at the India House (see the Elia essay "The Superannuated Man"), and survived until 1872. It was to John Chambers that Lamb made the remark that he (Lamb) was probably the only man in England who had never worn boots and never ridden a horse. The letter, which is concerned with the peculiarities of India House clerks, is famous for the remark on Tommy Bye, a fellow-clerk at the India House, that "his sonnets are most like Petrarch of any foreign poet, or what we may suppose Petrarch would have written if Petrarch had been born a fool." We meet Bye again in the next letter but one to Wordsworth. I can find no trace of his sonnets in book form. Possibly they were never published.]
LETTER 246
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[This letter is written in black and red ink, changing with each line.]