You don't know the difference in getting a thing early. Your correspondents are your authors. You don't know how an author frets to know the world has got his contribution, when he finds it not on his breakfast table.
ONCE in this case is EVER without a grain of trouble afterw'ds.
I won't like you or speak to you if you don't try it once.
Yours, on that condition,
C. LAMB.
[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt conjecturally 1826, but I think it more probably October, 1827, as the extracts (passages from Crowne's "Thyestes") contributed by Lamb to Hone's Table Book were printed late in 1827.
In Lamb's next note to Hone he says how glad he was to receive the Table Book early on Friday: the result of the fable.]
LETTER 437
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD
[No date. ? 1827.]