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　　LETTER 401

　　CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN

　　[P.M. September 9, 1826.]

　　An answer is requested.

　　Saturday.

　　Dear D.—I have observed that a Letter is never more acceptable than when received upon a rainy day, especially a rainy Sunday; which moves me to send you somewhat, however short. This will find you sitting after Breakfast, which you will have prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor handmaid that has the reversion of the Tea Leaves; making two nibbles of your last morsel of stale roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the Sabbath), and reluctantly coming to an end, because when that is done, what can you do till dinner? You cannot go to the Beach, for the rain is drowning the sea, turning rank Thetis fresh, taking the brine out of Neptune's pickles, while mermaids sit upon rocks with umbrellas, their ivory combs sheathed for spoiling in the wet of waters foreign to them. You cannot go to the library, for it's shut. You are not religious enough to go to church. O it is worth while to cultivate piety to the gods, to have something to fill the heart up on a wet Sunday! You cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with moths in the Ancient Jewry. You cannot play at draughts, for there is none to play with you, and besides there is not a draught board in the house. You cannot go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot look in to the shops, their backs are shut upon you. You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good reading for the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot while away an hour with a friend, for you have no friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert yourself with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot bear the chiming of Bells, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no visitant. You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow's letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials on the mantlepiece with any hope of making a variation in their numbers. You have counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and deliberately curse your hard exile from all familiar sights and sounds. Old Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly would just now be as good to you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you from this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are too ill to shake it off: not ill enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: 'tis to have Thirty Tyrants for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes out, who was something to you, something to speak to—what an interminable afternoon you'll have to go thro'. You can't break yourself from your locality: you cannot say "Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead, by God": for you are book'd for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I thought a cheerful letter would come in opportunely. If any of the little topics for mirth I have thought upon should serve you in this utter extinguishment of sunshine, to make you a little merry, I shall have had my ends. I love to make things comfortable. [Here is an erasure.] This, which is scratch'd out was the most material thing I had to say, but on maturer thoughts I defer it.

　　P.S.—We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, to_day_), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean to be.

　　C. LAMB.

　　[Addressed to "T. Dibdin Esq're. No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings, Sussex."

　　"You have counted your spiders." Referring, I suppose, to Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.

　　"Grimaldi"—Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin's employers.

　　"A pleasant party." Reynolds, the dramatist, would be Frederic Reynolds (1764-1841); Bloxam we have just met; and Wyat of the Wells was a comic singer and utility actor at Sadler's Wells.

　　Canon Ainger remarks that as a matter of fact Dibdin was a religious youth.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6