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　　LETTER 162

　　CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

　　[Dated at end: January 29, 1807.]

　　Dear Wordsworth—

　　We have book'd off from Swan and Two Necks, Lad Lane, this day (per Coach) the Tales from Shakespear. You will forgive the plates, when I tell you they were left to the direction of Godwin, who left the choice of subjects to the bad baby, who from mischief (I suppose) has chosen one from damn'd beastly vulgarity (vide Merch. Venice) where no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it—to another has given a name which exists not in the tale, Nic Bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this I suspect his hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough to know Bottom's Xtian name—and one of Hamlet, and Grave digging, a scene which is not hinted at in the story, and you might as well have put King Canute the Great reproving his courtiers— the rest are Giants and Giantesses. Suffice it, to save our taste and damn our folly, that we left it all to a friend W. G.—who in the first place cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent, and then wrote a puff about their simplicity, &c., to go with the advertisement as in my name! Enough of this egregious dupery.—I will try to abstract the load of teazing circumstances from the Stories and tell you that I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and all of the spelling. The rest is my Sister's.—We think Pericles of hers the best, and Othello of mine—but I hope all have some good. As You Like It we like least.

　　So much, only begging you to tear out the cuts and give them to Johnny, as "Mrs. Godwin's fancy."

　　C. L.

　　Thursday, 29 Jan., 1807.

　　Our Love to all.

　　I had almost forgot,

　　My part of the Preface begins in the middle of a sentence, in last but one page after a colon thus

　　:—which if they be happily so done &c.

　　the former part hath a more feminine turn and does hold me up something as an instructor to young Ladies: but upon my modesty's honour I wrote it not.

　　Godwin told My Sister that the Baby chose the Subjects. A fact in Taste.

　　[Lamb has run his pen lightly through "God bless me," at the beginning of the postscript.

　　The plates to the Tales from Shakespear will be found reproduced in facsimile in Vol. III. of my large edition. They were designed probably by Mulready.

　　An interval of nine months occurs before we come to another letter of the date of which we can be certain. Of what happened in this time, we know little or nothing, but I think it probable that the following hitherto unpublished letter from Charles Lamb to the Clarksons explains part of the long silence. The postmark gives no year, but it must be either 1807 or 1808, and since the Dramatic Specimens herein referred to as in preparation were published in 1808, we may confidently assume it to be 1807. The letter tells its own story only too clearly: the Lambs had been on a visit to the Clarksons at Bury St. Edmunds; Mary Lamb had again fallen ill while there; and her brother had just left her once more at her Hoxton Asylum.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5