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　　LETTER 234

　　MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON

　　[No date. ? Late 1816.]

　　My dear Miss Hutchinson, I had intended to write you a long letter, but as my frank is dated I must send it off with a bare acknowledgment of the receipt of your kind letter. One question I must hastily ask you. Do you think Mr. Wordsworth would have any reluctance to write (strongly recommending to their patronage) to any of his rich friends in London to solicit employment for Miss Betham as a Miniature Painter? If you give me hopes that he will not be averse to do this, I will write to you more fully stating the infinite good he would do by performing so irksome a task as I know asking favours to be. In brief, she has contracted debts for printing her beautiful poem of "Marie," which like all things of original excellence does not sell at all.

　　These debts have led to little accidents unbecoming a woman and a poetess to suffer. Retirement with such should be voluntary.

　　[Charles Lamb adds:—]

　　The Bell rings. I just snatch the Pen out of my sister's hand to finish rapidly. Wordsw'th. may tell De Q that Miss B's price for a Virgin and Child is three guineas.

　　Yours (all of you) ever

　　C. L.

　　["De Q"—Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the "opium-eater," then living at Grasmere. Lamb and De Quincey had first met in 1804; but it was not until 1821 that they became really intimate, when Lamb introduced him to the London Magazine.

　　Miss Betham painted miniature portraits, among others, of Mrs. S. T.

　　Coleridge and Sara Coleridge.

　　Here should come a note to William Ayrton dated April 18, 1817, thanking him for much pleasure at "Don Giovanni" (see note to next letter).

　　Somewhen in 1816 should come a letter from Lamb to Leigh Hunt on the publication of The Story of Rimini, mentioned in Leigh Hunt's Correspondence, of which this is the only sentence that is preserved: "The third Canto is in particular my favourite: we congratulate you most sincerely on the trait [? taste] of your prison fruit."] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5