of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd
decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be "dark jests"
abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And
'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries and false
Gospels are not peculiar to the Age following the Apostles. And some
tubs don't stand on their right bottoms. Which is all I wish to say in
these ticklish Times--and so your Servant,

CHS. LAMB.

[We do not know the nature of the "bite" that Procter had put upon Lamb;
but Lamb quickly retaliated with the first paragraph of this letter,
which is mainly invention. In his _Old Acquaintance_ Mr. Fields wrote:
"He [Procter] told me that the law question raised in this epistle was a
sheer fabrication of Lamb's, gotten up by him to puzzle his young
correspondent, the conveyancer. The coolness referred to between himself
and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented by
Lamb to carry out his legal mystification."

At the end of the first paragraph came some words in another hand: "_in
usum_ enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seized, &c.,"
beneath which Lamb wrote: "The above is some of M. Burney's memoranda
which he has left me, and you may cut out and give him."

Procter's verses for Emma Isola's album I have not seen, but Canon
Ainger says that they refer to "Isola Bella, whom all poets love," the
island in Lago di Maggiore.

This is a list of the contents of Emma Isola's Album, all autographs
(from Quaritch's catalogue, September, 1886):--

CHARLES LAMB. "What is an Album?" a poem addressed to
Miss Emma Isola.

"To Emma on her Twenty-first Birthday," May 25, 1830.

"Harmony in Unlikeness." Without date.

JOHN KEATS. "To my Brother," a sonnet on the birthday of his
brother Tom, dated Nov. 18 (? 1814 or 1815).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. "She dwelt among the untrodden
ways," three verses of his poem on Lucy, copied in his
own hand on March 18, 1837.

"Blessings be with them, and enduring praise," five lines of
a sonnet dated Rydal, 1838.

ALFRED TENNYSON. "When Lazarus left his charnel-cave," four
stanzas, undated.

THOMAS MOORE. "Woman gleans but sorrow," and note to
Moxon, June, 1844.

LEIGH HUNT. "Apollo's Autograph," from an unpublished poem
called "The Feast of the Violets." Undated, _circa_ 1838.

THOMAS HOOD. "Dreams," a prose fragment, without date, _circa_