ich could not now be explained even if it were worth while. The Lambs
were arranging a visit to Versailles, to the Kenneys. Mr. Henshaw was
Lamb's godfather, a gunsmith.]

LETTER 288

(_Fragment_)

CHARLES LAMB TO MARY LAMB (in Paris).

[August, 1822.]

Then you must walk all along the Borough side of the Seine facing the
Tuileries. There is a mile and a half of print shops and book stalls. If
the latter were but English. Then there is a place where the Paris
people put all their dead people and bring em flowers and dolls and
ginger bread nuts and sonnets and such trifles. And that is all I think
worth seeing as sights, except that the streets and shops of Paris are
themselves the best sight.

[The Lambs had left England for France in June. While they were there
Mary Lamb was taken ill again--in a diligence, according to Moore--and
Lamb had to return home alone, leaving a letter, of which this is the
only portion that has been preserved, for her guidance on her recovery.
It is also the only writing from Lamb to his sister that exists. Mary
Lamb, who had taken her nurse with her in case of trouble, was soon well
again, and in August had the company of Crabb Robinson in Paris. Mrs.
Aders was also there, and Foss, the bookseller in Pall Mall, and his
brother. And it was on this visit that the Lambs met John Howard Payne,
whom we shall shortly see.]

LETTER 289

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN CLARE

India House, 31 Aug., 1822.

Dear Clare--I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate
old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be
native to them, and free of the country. The quantity of your
observation has astonished me. What have most pleased me have been
Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in
eight syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and
Solitude. In some of your story-telling Ballads the provincial phrases
sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry
_slang_ of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick Cockneyism,
as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone.
The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found in
Shenstone. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been
better, if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a
home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where nothing is gained in
expression, it is out of