This letter will introduce you, if 'tis agreeable. Take a donkey. 'Tis
Novello the Composer and his Wife, our very good friends.
C.L.
[Dibdin must have sent the verses which Lamb asked for in the previous letter, and this is Lamb's reply. Pride of ancestry seems to have been the note of Dibdin's effort. Probably there is a certain amount of truth in Lamb's account of the resolute merriment of his father. It is not inconsistent with his description of Lovel in the Elia essay "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple."
"I have stol'n a quip." The manner rather than the precise matter, I think.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Coleridge's nephew, dated July 19, 1826. It thanks the recipient for his kindness to the child of a friend of Lamb's, Samuel Anthony Bloxam, Coleridge having assisted in getting Frederick Bloxam into Eton (where he was a master) on the foundation. Samuel Bloxam and Lamb were at Christ's Hospital together.]
LETTER 399
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
[P.M. September 6, 1826.]
My dear Wordsworth, The Bearer of this is my young friend Moxon, a young lad with a Yorkshire head, and a heart that would do honour to a more Southern county: no offence to Westmoreland. He is one of Longman's best hands, and can give you the best account of The Trade as 'tis now going; or stopping. For my part, the failure of a Bookseller is not the most unpalatable accident of mortality:
sad but not saddest The desolation of a hostile city.