In the same vein is the following, written under similar circumstances:

"I have had my head and ears stuffed up with the east winds. A continual ringing in my brain of bells jangled, or the spheres touched by some raw angel. Is it not George the Third tuning the Hundredth Psalm? I get my music for nothing. But the weather seems to be softening, and will thaw my stunnings. Coleridge, writing to me a week or two since, began his note: 'Summer has set in with his usual severity.' A cold summer is all I know disagreeable in cold. I do not mind the utmost rigour of real winter, but these smiling hypocritical Mays wither me to death. My head has been ringing chaos, like the day the winds were made, before they submitted to the discipline of a weather-cock, before the quarters were made. In the street, with the blended noises of life about me, I hear, and my head is lightened; but in a room, the hubbub comes back, and I am deaf as a sinner. Did I tell you of a pleasant sketch Hood has done, which he calls, 'Very deaf indeed?' It is of a good-natured, stupid-looking old gentleman, whom a foot-pad has stopped, but for his extreme deafness cannot make him understand what he wants. The unconscious old gentleman is extending his ear-trumpet very complacently, and the fellow is firing a pistol into it to make him hear, but the ball will pierce his skull sooner than the report reach his sensorium. I choose a very little bit of paper, for my ear hisses when I bend down to write. I can hardly read a book, for I miss that small soft voice which the idea of articulated words raises (almost imperceptibly to you) in a silent reader. I seem too deaf to see what I read. But with a touch of returning zephyr, my head will melt."

It is in a letter to the same staid correspondent, that we find the following reflections on the fate of Fauntleroy, who was executed many years since in London. It is 'a strange mingling of humor and solemn truth:'

"And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual, with the charge of them. Who that standeth, knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated into other's property. You think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence; but so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many beside him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker, or at least the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour——but I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged, as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not for their resemblance to the ape tribe, (which is something,) but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, etc."

Here is a capital programme for those losel scouts whose 'tales of the crusades' which are waged against the canine species, generally fill our newspapers in the dog-days. We have no doubt that similar suggestions to those here thrown out, have been acted upon by many a dog-hater, in the fervid summer solstice, what time a worse virus than the hydrophobic was raging in his brain. Lamb is inquiring after his adopted dog, 'Dash:'

"Goes he muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him. All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people, to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water: if he won't lick it up, it is a sign—he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally, or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased—for otherwise there is no judging. You can't be too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time; but that was in Hyder-Ally's time. Do you get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull out his teeth, (if he would let you,) and then you need not mind if he were as mad as a bedlamite."

There is an adroit satire upon epitaphs—certificates of good character given to persons on going to a new place, who oftentimes had none in the places they left—in the annexed fragment from a letter enclosing an acrostic:

"I am afraid I shall sicken you of acrostics, but this last was written to order. I beg you to have inserted in your country paper, something like this advertisement: 'To the nobility, gentry, and others about Bury:—C. Lamb respectfully informs his friends and the public in general, that he is leaving off business in the acrostic line, as he is going into an entirely new line. Rebuses and charades done as usual, and upon the old terms. Also, epitaphs to suit the memory of any person deceased.'"

A few original anecdotes of Lamb must close our notice for the present. The first dry specimen was doubtless suggested by the closing couplet of a London street-ballad, wherein is set forth the ultra fickleness of a female 'lovyer:'

'And there I spied that faithless she,
A fryin' sassengers for he!'