the mercantile. I don't know how it is, but I keep my
rank in fancy still since school-days. I can never forget I was a deputy
Grecian! And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides affection, I feel
a reverential deference as to Grecians still. I keep my soaring way
above the Great Erasmians, yet far beneath the other. Alas! what am I
now? what is a Leadenhall clerk or India pensioner to a deputy Grecian?
How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., &c.

C. LAMB.

["I never writ of you but _con amore_." Lamb refers particularly to the
_Elia_ essay "Oxford in the Vacation" in the _London Magazine_, where
G.D.'s absence of mind and simplicity of character were dwelt upon more
intimately than Dyer liked (see Vol. II.).

Dyer was gradually going blind.

"The Answerer of Salmasius"--Milton.

"Comely" Mrs. Dyer. But in the letter to Mrs. Shelley, Mrs. D. had been
"plain"!

Dyer had been a Grecian before Lamb was born. Clarke would be Charles
Cowden Clarke, with whose father Dyer had been an usher. Miss Hayes we
have met. The Rev. Peter Whalley was Upper Grammar Master in Dyer's day;
Boyer, Lamb and Coleridge's master, succeeded him in 1776. Smith was
Writing Master at the end of the seventeenth century.

Lamb had never become a Grecian, having an impediment in his speech
which made it impossible that he should take orders, the natural fate of
Grecians, with profit. Great Erasmus and Little Erasmus are still the
names of classes in the Blue-Coat School. Grecians were the Little
Erasmians.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to P.G. Patmore, dated April 10,
1831, in which Lamb says of the publisher of the _New Monthly Magazine_:
"Nature never wrote Knave upon a face more legible than upon that
fellow's--'Coal-burn him in Beelzebub's deepest pit.' I can promise
little help if you mean literary, when I reflect that for 5 years I have
been feeling the necessity of scribbling but have never found the
power.... _Moxon_ is my go between, call on _him_, 63 New Bond St., he
is a very good fellow and the bookseller is not yet burn'd into him."
Patmore was seeking a publisher for, I imagine, his _Chatsworth_.

Here should come a letter from Lamb, dated April 13, 1831, which Canon
Ainger considers was written to Gary and Mr. Hazlitt to Coleridge. It
states that Lamb is daily expecting Wordsworth.]

LETTER 531

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

April 30, 1831.

Vir Bone!--Recepi literas tuas ami