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　　LETTER 263

　　CHARLES LAMB TO BARRON FIELD

　　London, 16 Aug., 1820.

　　Dear Field,—Captain Ogilvie, who conveys this note to you, and is now paying for the first time a visit to your remote shores, is the brother of a Gentleman intimately connected with the family of the Whites, I mean of Bishopsgate Street—and you will much oblige them and myself by any service or civilities you can shew him.

　　I do not mean this for an answer to your warm-hearted Epistle, which demands and shall have a much fuller return. We receiped your Australian First Fruits, of which I shall say nothing here, but refer you to **** of the Examiner, who speaks our mind on all public subjects. I can only assure you that both Coleridge and Wordsworth, and also C. Lloyd, who has lately reappeared in the poetical horizon, were hugely taken with your Kangaroo.

　　When do you come back full of riches and renown, with the regret of all the honest, and all the other part of the colony? Mary swears she shall live to see it.

　　Pray are you King's or Queen's men in Sidney? Or have thieves no politics? Man, don't let this lie about your room for your bed sweeper or Major Domo to see, he mayn't like the last paragraph.

　　This is a dull and lifeless scroll. You shall have soon a tissue of truth and fiction impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the partitions perfectly invisible, it shall puzzle you till you return, & [then] I will not explain it. Till then a … adieu, with kind rem'brces of me both to you & … [Signature and a few words torn off.]

　　[Barron Field, who was still in New South Wales, had published his poems under the title First-Fruits of Australian Poetry, and Lamb had reviewed them in The Examiner for January 16, 1820, over his usual signature in that paper, * * * *. "The Kangaroo" is "ed in that review (see Vol. I. of the present edition).

　　Captain Ogilvie was the brother of a clerk at the India House, who gave Mr. Joseph H. Twichell some reminiscences of Lamb, which were printed in Scribner's Magazine.

　　"King's or Queen's men"—supporters of George IV. or Caroline of Brunswick. Lamb was very strongly in favour of the Queen, as his Champion epigrams show (see Vol. IV.).

　　"You shall soon see." Lamb's first reference to the Elia essays, alluding here to "The South-Sea House."

　　Here should come a letter from Lamb to Hazlitt. Lamb says that his sister is ill again and that the last thing she read was Hazlitt's "Thursday Nights" which gave her unmixed delight—the reference being to the second part of the essay "On the Conversation of Authors," which was printed in the London Magazine for September, 1820, describing Lamb's evenings. Stoddart, Hazlitt's brother-in-law, Lamb adds, says it is better than Hogarth's "Modern Midnight Conversation."

　　Here should come a business note to John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, dated August 24, 1820, given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5