erature about him from being
amongst books (he was librarian), and from some scraps of doubtful Latin
which he had picked up in his office of entering students, that gave him
very diverting airs of pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look with
which, when he had been in vain trying to make out a black-letter text
of Chaucer in the Temple Library, he laid it down and told me that--"in
those old books, Charley, there is sometimes a deal of very indifferent
spelling;" and seemed to console himself in the reflection! His jokes,
for he had his jokes, are now ended, but they were old trusty
perennials, staples that pleased after _decies repetita_, and were
always as good as new. One song he had, which was reserved for the night
of Christmas-day, which we always spent in the Temple. It was an old
thing, and spoke of the flat bottoms of our foes and the possibility of
their coming over in darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion
many years blown over; and when he came to the part

"We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat,
In spite of the devil and Brussels Gazette!"

his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event. And
what is the "Brussels Gazette" now? I cry while I enumerate these
trifles. "How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear?" His poor good
girls will now have to receive their afflicted mother in an inaccessible
hovel in an obscure village in Herts, where they have been long
struggling to make a school without effect; and poor deaf Richard--and
the more helpless for being so--is thrown on the wide world.

My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask
if you were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers, to lay a plain
statement before them of the circumstances of the family. I almost fear
not, for you are of another hall. But if you can oblige me and my poor
friend, who is now insensible to any favours, pray exert yourself. You
cannot say too much good of poor Norris and his poor wife.

Yours ever, CHARLES LAMB.

[This letter, describing the death of Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer and
Librarian of the Inner Temple, was printed with only very slight
alterations in Hone's _Table Book_, 1827, and again in the _Last Essays
of Elia_, 1833, under the title "A Death-Bed." It was, however, taken
out of the second edition, and "Confessions of a Drunkard" substituted,
in deference to the wishes o