So you still want a motto? You must
not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious
for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for _his_ lucubrations. What do
you think of (for a title) Religio Tremuli? or Tremebundi? There is
Religio Medici and Laici. But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish
enough, or exclusively so, for it. Your own "Vigils" is perhaps the
best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of
spring,--what a summery spring too! All those qualms about the dog and
cray-fish [1] melt before it. I am going to be happy and _vain_ again.
A hasty farewell,
C. LAMB.
[1] Lamb had confessed, in a previous letter to Barton, to having once
wantonly set a dog upon a cray-fish.
LXXXII.
TO BERNARD BARTON.
_May_ 15, 1824.
Dear B. B.,--I am oppressed with business all day, and company all
night. But I will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions
of the picture and the letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too
have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but
they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most
extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William]
Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the
"Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures
the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off,
God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac-simile to itself) left behind on
the dying bed.
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