ou at least to a rubber. On some future Saturday we
shall most gladly accept your kind offer. When I read your delicate
little note, I am ashamed of my great staring letters.

Yours most truly

CHARLES LAMB.

Dalston near Hackney

15 Mar. 1821.

[In my large edition I give a facsimile of this letter.]

LETTER 270

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP

30 March, 1821.

My dear Sir--If you can come next Sunday we shall be equally glad to see
you, but do not trust to any of Martin's appointments, except on
business, in future. He is notoriously faithless in that point, and we
did wrong not to have warned you. Leg of Lamb, as before; hot at 4. And
the heart of Lamb ever.

Yours truly, C.L.

LETTER 271

CHARLES LAMB TO LEIGH HUNT

_Indifferent Wednesday_ [April 18], 1821.

Dear Hunt,--There was a sort of side talk at Mr. Novello's about our
spending _Good Friday_ at Hampstead, but my sister has got so bad a
cold, and we both want rest so much, that you shall excuse our putting
off the visit some little time longer. Perhaps, after all, you know
nothing of it.--

Believe me, yours truly, C. LAMB.

LETTER 272

CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE

May 1st [1821],

Mr. Gilman's, Highgate.

Mr. C.--I will not fail you on Friday by six, and Mary, perhaps,
earlier. I very much wish to meet "Master Mathew," and am much obliged
to the G----s for the opportunity. Our kind respects to them
always.--ELIA.

Extract from a MS. note of S.T.C. in my Beaumont and Fletcher, dated
April 17th 1807.

_Midnight_.

"God bless you, dear Charles Lamb, I am dying; I feel I have not many
weeks left."

[Master Mathew is in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humour."

Lamb's "Beaumont and Fletcher" is in the British Museum. The note quoted
by Lamb is not there, or perhaps it is one that has been crossed out.
This still remains: "N.B. I shall not be long here, Charles! I gone, you
will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.
S.T.C., Oct. 1811."]

LETTER 273

CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN

[Dated at end: 2 May, 1821.]

Dear Sir--You dine so late on Friday, it will be impossible for us to go
home by the eight o'clock stage. Will you oblige us by securing us beds
at some house from which a stage goes to the Bank in the morning? I
would write to Coleridge, but cannot think of troubling a dying man with
such a request.