nd
feeling towards each other as we have always been wont to do.

Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me
your address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your
door, and shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her
most kindly and believe me--. Yours, with unabated esteem and
regards, Robert Southey.

The matter closed with this exchange of letters, and no hostility
remained on either side.

Lamb's quarrel with the _Quarterly_ began in 1811, when in a review of
Weber's edition of Ford Lamb was described as a "poor maniac." It was
renewed in 1814, when his article on Wordsworth's _Excursion_ was
mutilated. It broke out again in 1822, as Lamb says here, when a
reviewer of Reid's treatise on _Hypochondriasis and other Nervous
Affections_ (supposed to be Dr. Gooch, a friend of Dr. Henry Southey's)
referred to Lamb's "Confessions of a Drunkard" (see Vol. I.) as being,
from his own knowledge, true. Thus Lamb's patience was naturally at
breaking point when his own friend Southey attacked _Elia_ a few numbers
later.

"I do not think your handwriting at all like Hunt's." Lamb had said, in
the Letter, of Leigh Hunt: "His hand-writing is so much the same with
your own, that I have opened more than one letter of his, hoping, nay,
not doubting, but it was from you, and have been disappointed (he will
bear with my saying so) at the discovery of my error."]

LETTER 336

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. November 22, 1823.]

Dear B.B.--I am ashamed at not acknowledging your kind little poem,
which I must needs like much, but I protest I thought I had done it at
the moment. Is it possible a letter has miscarried? Did you get one in
which I sent you an extract from the poems of Lord Sterling? I should
wonder if you did, for I sent you none such.--There was an incipient lye
strangled in the birth. Some people's conscience is so tender! But in
plain truth I thank you very much for the verses. I have a very kind
letter from the Laureat, with a self-invitation to come and shake hands
with me. This is truly handsome and noble. 'Tis worthy of my old idea of
Southey. Shall not I, think you, be covered with a red suffusion?

You are too much apprehensive of your complaint. I know many that are
always ailing of it, and live on to a good old age. I know a merry
fellow (you partly know him) who when his Medical Adviser told him he
had drunk away all _t