您可以在百度里搜索“The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 艾草文学(www.321553.xyz)”查找最新章节！

　　LETTER 329

　　CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

　　[P.M. September 17, 1823.]

　　Dear Sir—I have again been reading your stanzas on Bloomfield, which are the most appropriate that can be imagined, sweet with Doric delicacy. I like that

　　Our more chaste Theocritus—

　　just hinting at the fault of the Grecian. I love that stanza ending with

　　Words phrases fashions pass away;

　　But Truth and nature live through all.

　　But I shall omit in my own copy the one stanza which alludes to Lord B.—I suppose. It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling. Cannot we think of Burns, or Thompson, without sullying the thought with a reflection out of place upon Lord Rochester? These verses might have been inscribed upon a tomb; are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone. Besides, there is a "ation in it, always bad in verse; seldom advisable in prose.

　　I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall try them. Omitting that stanza, a very little alteration is want'g in the beginn'g of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily (I flatter not!) you have bro't in his subjects; and, (I suppose) his favorite measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the Farmer's Boy. He dined with me once, and his manners took me exceedingly.

　　I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.

　　Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean associations, Hawking and sp——-g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is every thing, in such dulcet modulations 'specially. I like

　　Gilbert Meldrum's sterner tones,

　　without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally. There's a vile phrase.

　　Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets—[to] have 'em ready with Southey's Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.

　　Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho' entirely yours C.L.

　　[Barton's "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet" (who died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils, 1824. This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:—

　　It is not quaint and local terms

　　Besprinkled o'er thy rustic lay,

　　Though well such dialect confirms

　　Its power unletter'd minds to sway,

　　It is not these that most display

　　Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,—

　　Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,

　　But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.

　　The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word Horkey, which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a character in one of Bloomfield's Rural Tales.

　　"Quaker Sonnets." Barton did not carry out this project. Southey's Book of the Church was published in 1824.

　　"I meditate a letter to S." The "Letter of Elia to Mr. Southey" was published in the London Magazine for October, 1823.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6