ing costumes, a great
requisite in an account of mannered pictures. I have not the slightest
acquaintance with pictorial language even. An imitator of me, or rather
pretender to be _me_, in his Rejected Articles, has made me minutely
describe the dresses of the poissardes at Calais!--I could as soon
resolve Euclid. I have no eye for forms and fashions. I substitute
analysis, and get rid of the phenomenon by slurring in for it its
impression. I am sure you must have observed this defect, or
peculiarity, in my writings; else the delight would be incalculable in
doing such a thing for Mathews, whom I greatly like--and Mrs. Mathews,
whom I almost greatlier like. What a feast 'twould be to be sitting at
the pictures painting 'em into words; but I could almost as soon make
words into pictures. I speak this deliberately, and not out of modesty.
I pretty well know what I can't do.

My sister's verses are homely, but just what they should be; I send
them, not for the poetry, but the good sense and good-will of them. I
was beginning to transcribe; but Emma is sadly jealous of its getting
into more hands, and I won't spoil it in her eyes by divulging it. Come
to Enfield, and _read it_. As my poor cousin, the bookbinder, now with
God, told me, most sentimentally, that having purchased a picture of
fish at a dead man's sale, his heart ached to see how the widow grieved
to part with it, being her dear husband's favourite; and he almost
apologised for his generosity by saying he could not help telling the
widow she was "welcome to come and look at it"--e.g. at _his house_--"as
often as she pleased." There was the germ of generosity in an uneducated
mind. He had just _reading_ enough from the backs of books for the "_nec
sinit esse feros_"--had he read inside, the same impulse would have led
him to give back the two-guinea thing--with a request to see it, now and
then, at _her_ house. We are parroted into delicacy.--Thus you have a
tale for a Sonnet.

Adieu! with (imagine both) our loves. C. LAMB.

[The suggestion had been made to Lamb, through Barron Field, that he
should write a descriptive catalogue of Charles Mathews' collection of
theatrical portraits; Lamb having already touched upon them in his "Old
Actors" articles in the _London Magazine_ (see Vol. II. of this
edition). When they were exhibited, after Mathews' death, at the
Pantheon in Oxford Street, Lamb's remarks were appended to the catalogue
_rai