A red-haired man has just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my thoughts. I haven't a word to add. I don't know why I send this letter, but I have had a hankering to hear about you some days. Perhaps it will go off, before your reply comes. If it don't, I assure you no letter was ever welcomer from you, from Paris or Macao. C. LAMB.
[At the beginning of this letter is an unprinted passage saying that Charles Lloyd and his wife are in London and that such proximity is not too comfortable. "Would you like to see him?" or "isn't it better to lean over a stile in a sort of careless easy half astronomical position eyeing the blue expanse?"
Manning, who had now settled in England, but in retirement, was living in Hertfordshire, at Totteridge. The Gladmans and Brutons are mentioned in the Elia essay "Mackery End in Hertfordshire":—
"The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house,—delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the country, but the Fields are almost extinct."
The Goblin Page is in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel.
"Mrs. Gold is well"—née Fanny Burrell.
"This dead wood of the desk." Lamb used this figure more than once, in his letters and elsewhere. In the Elia essay "The Superannuated Man" he says: "I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.">[
LETTER 248
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[P.M. June 7, 1819.]