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　　LETTER 436

　　CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE

　　[No date. Oct., 1827.]

　　Dear Hone,—having occasion to write to Clarke I put in a bit to you. I see no Extracts in this N'o. You should have three sets in hand, one long one in particular from Atreus and Thyestes, terribly fine. Don't spare 'em; with fragments, divided as you please, they'll hold out to Xmas. What I have to say is enjoined me most seriously to say to you by Moxon. Their country customers grieve at getting the Table Book so late. It is indispensable it should appear on Friday. Do it but once, & you'll never know the difference.

　　FABLE

　　A boy at my school, a cunning fox, for one penny ensured himself a hot roll & butter every morning for ever. Some favor'd ones were allowed a roll & butter to their breakfasts. He had none. But he bought one one morning. What did he do? He did not eat it, but cutting it in two, sold each one of the halves to a half-breakfasted Blue Boy for his whole roll to-morrow. The next day he had a whole roll to eat, and two halves to swap with other two boys, who had eat their cake & were still not satiated, for whole ones to-morrow. So on ad infinitum. By one morning's abstinence he feasted seven years after.

　　APPLICATION

　　Bring out the next N'o. on Friday, for country correspondents' sake. I[t] will be one piece of exertion, and you will go right ever after, for you will have just the time you had before, to bring it out ever after by the Friday.

　　You don't know the difference in getting a thing early. Your correspondents are your authors. You don't know how an author frets to know the world has got his contribution, when he finds it not on his breakfast table.

　　ONCE in this case is EVER without a grain of trouble afterw'ds.

　　I won't like you or speak to you if you don't try it once.

　　Yours, on that condition,

　　C. LAMB.

　　[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt conjecturally 1826, but I think it more probably October, 1827, as the extracts (passages from Crowne's "Thyestes") contributed by Lamb to Hone's Table Book were printed late in 1827.

　　In Lamb's next note to Hone he says how glad he was to receive the Table Book early on Friday: the result of the fable.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6