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　　LETTER 348

　　CHARLES LAMB TO W. MARTER [Dated at end: July 19 (1824).]

　　Dear Marter,—I have just rec'd your letter, having returned from a month's holydays. My exertions for the London are, tho' not dead, in a dead sleep for the present. If your club like scandal, Blackwood's is your magazine; if you prefer light articles, and humorous without offence, the New Monthly is very amusing. The best of it is by Horace Smith, the author of the Rejected Addresses. The Old Monthly has more of matter, information, but not so merry. I cannot safely recommend any others, as not knowing them, or knowing them to their disadvantage. Of Reviews, beside what you mention, I know of none except the Review on Hounslow Heath, which I take it is too expensive for your ordering. Pity me, that have been a Gentleman these four weeks, and am reduced in one day to the state of a ready writer. I feel, I feel, my gentlemanly qualities fast oozing away—such as a sense of honour, neckcloths twice a day, abstinence from swearing, &c. The desk enters into my soul.

　　See my thoughts on business next Page.

　　SONNET

　　Who first invented work?—and bound the free

　　And holyday-rejoicing Spirit down

　　To the ever-haunting importunity

　　Of Business in the green fields, and the Town—

　　To plough, loom, [anvil], spade, and (oh most sad!)

　　To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?

　　Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,

　　Sabbathless Satan! He, who his unglad

　　Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,

　　That round and round incalculably reel—

　　For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—

　　In that red realm from whence are no returnings;

　　Where toiling & turmoiling ever & aye

　　He and his Thoughts keep pensive worky-day.

　　With many recollections of pleasanter times, my old compeer, happily released before me, Adieu. C. LAMB.

　　E.I.H.

　　19 July [1824].

　　[Marter was an old India House clerk; we do not meet with him again. The sonnet had been printed in The Examiner in 1819. Lamb, who was fond of it, reprinted it in Album Verses, 1830.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6