[We do not know the nature of the "bite" that Procter had put upon Lamb; but Lamb quickly retaliated with the first paragraph of this letter, which is mainly invention. In his Old Acquaintance Mr. Fields wrote: "He [Procter] told me that the law question raised in this epistle was a sheer fabrication of Lamb's, gotten up by him to puzzle his young correspondent, the conveyancer. The coolness referred to between himself and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented by Lamb to carry out his legal mystification."
At the end of the first paragraph came some words in another hand: "in usum enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seized, &c.," beneath which Lamb wrote: "The above is some of M. Burney's memoranda which he has left me, and you may cut out and give him."
Procter's verses for Emma Isola's album I have not seen, but Canon Ainger says that they refer to "Isola Bella, whom all poets love," the island in Lago di Maggiore.
This is a list of the contents of Emma Isola's Album, all autographs (from Quaritch's catalogue, September, 1886):—
CHARLES LAMB. "What is an Album?" a poem addressed to
Miss Emma Isola.
"To Emma on her Twenty-first Birthday," May 25, 1830.
"Harmony in Unlikeness." Without date.
JOHN KEATS. "To my Brother," a sonnet on the birthday of his brother Tom, dated Nov. 18 (? 1814 or 1815).
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," three verses of his poem on Lucy, copied in his own hand on March 18, 1837.
"Blessings be with them, and enduring praise," five lines of
a sonnet dated Rydal, 1838.