"He sang in meads how sweet the brooklets ran,
To the rough ocean and red restless sands."
I design to give up smoking; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent vice. I must have quid pro quo; or quo pro quid, as Tom Woodgate would correct me. My service to him. C.L.
[This is the first letter to Hood, then a young man of twenty-five, and
assistant editor of the London Magazine. He was now staying at
Hastings, on his honeymoon, presumably, and, like the Lambs, near the
Priory.
"Cucullus non facit Monachum"—A "Lamb-pun." The Hood does not make the monk.
"Old Lignum Janua"—the Tom Woodgate mentioned at the end of the letter, a boatman at Hastings. Hood wrote some verses to him.
"My old New River." This passage was placed by Hood as the motto of his verses "Walton Redivivus," in Whims and Oddities, 1826.
"Little churchling." This is Lamb's second description of Hollingdon
Rural. The third and best is in a later letter.
"There is nothing like inland murmurs." Lamb is here remembering
Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines:—
With a sweet inland murmur.
In the Elia essay "The Old Margate Hoy" Lamb, in speaking of Hastings, had made the same objection.