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　　LETTER 198

　　MARY LAMB TO MATILDA BETHAM

　　[No date. Feb., 1811.]

　　My dear Matilda,—Coleridge has given me a very chearful promise that he will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint; he offered to write to you; but I found it was to be done tomorrow, and as I am pretty well acquainted with his tomorrows, I thought good to let you know his determination today. He is in town today, but as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for you as well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days' previous notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention all these betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as I do, it is a thing you have set your heart upon. He dined one [d]ay in company with Catilana (is that the way you spell her Italian name?—I am reading Sallust, and had like to have written Catiline). How I should have liked, and how you would have liked, to have seen Coleridge and Catilana together!

　　You have been very good of late to let me come and see you so seldom, and you are a little goodish to come so seldom here, because you stay away from a kind motive. But if you stay away always, as I fear you mean to do, I would not give one pin for your good intentions. In plain words, come and see me very soon; for though I be not sensitive as some people, I begin to feel strange qualms for having driven you from me.

　　Yours affectionately,

　　M. LAMB.

　　Wednesday.

　　Alas! Wednesday shines no more to me now.

　　Miss Duncan played famously in the new comedy, which went off as famously. By the way, she put in a spiteful piece of wit, I verily believe of her own head; and methought she stared me full in the face. The words were "As silent as an author in company." Her hair and herself looked remarkably well.

　　[Angelica Catalani (1782-1849) was the great singer. I find no record of

　　Coleridge's meeting with her.

　　"Miss Duncan." Praise of this lady in Miss Hardcastle and other parts

　　will be found in Leigh Hunt's Critical Essays on the Performers of the

　　London Theatres, 1807. At this time she was playing with the Drury Lane

　　Company at the Lyceum. They produced several new plays.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5