ust wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none.
'Tis barren all and dearth. No matter; life is something without
scribbling. I have got rid of my bad spirits, and hold up pretty well
this rain-damn'd May.

So we have lost another Poet. I never much relished his Lordship's mind,
and shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me
offensive, and I never can make out his great _power_, which his
admirers talk of. Why, a line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the
immortal spirit! Byron can only move the Spleen. He was at best a
Satyrist,--in any other way he was mean enough. I dare say I do him
injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He
did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman Curtis advised
the Radicals, "If they don't like their country, damn 'em, let 'em leave
it," they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he 10,000 acres.
Byron was better than many Curtises.

Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so
much in that kind.

Yours ever truly, C.L.

[Lamb's portrait of his father is reproduced in Vol. II. of my large
edition. The first love verses are no more.

William Blake was at this time sixty-six years of age. He was living in
poverty and neglect at 3 Fountain Court, Strand. Blake made 537
illustrations to Young's _Night Thoughts_, of which only forty-seven
were published. Lamb is, however, thinking of his edition of Blair's
_Grave_. The exhibition of his works was held in 1809, and it was for
this that Blake wrote the descriptive catalogue. Lamb had sent Blake's
"Sweep Song," which, like "Tiger, Tiger," is in the _Songs of
Innocence_, to James Montgomery for his _Chimney-Sweepers' Friend and
Climbing Boys' Album_, 1824, a little book designed to ameliorate the
lot of those children, in whose interest a society existed. Barton also
contributed something. It was Blake's poem which had excited Barton's
curiosity. Probably he thought that Lamb wrote it. Lamb's mistake
concerning Blake's name is curious in so far as that it was Blake's
brother Robert, who died in 1787, who in a vision revealed to the poet
the method by which the _Songs of Innocence_ were to be reproduced.

"The Dream awkwardly paraphras'd from B." The book ended with three
"Climbing-Boys' Soliloquies" by Montgomery. The second was a dream in
which the dream in Blake's song was extended and p