rs_,
collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little
box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the
paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find _all_ your letters in the box
by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room
of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell's
"Bibliotheca Politica," which you used to learn your politics out of
when you wrote for the Post,--_mutatis mutandis, i. e._, applying past
inferences to modern _data_. I retain that, because I am sensible I am
very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up--don't be
angry; waste paper has risen forty per cent, and I can't afford to buy
it--all Bonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one or
two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the
flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking.
Mary says you will be in a passion about them when you come to miss
them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis
Amissis five times over after phlebotomizing,--'t is Burton's
recipe,--and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. Sara is
obscure. Am I to understand by her letter that she sends a _kiss_ to
Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on
the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical! She proposes
writing my name _Lambe? Lamb_ is quite enough. I have had the
Anthology, and like only one thing in it,--_Lewti_; but of that the
last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite! The epithet
_enviable_ would dash the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more
serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted
in print, or do it in better verses. [1] It did well enough five years
ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time
you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets: but, besides that, the
meaning of "gentle" is equivocal at best, and almost always means
"poor-spirited;" the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such
vile trumpetings. My _sentiment_ is long since vanished. I hope my
_virtues_ have done _sucking_. I can scarce think but you meant it in
joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to think you could think
to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some
green-sick sonneteer.

[1] An allusion to Coleridge's lines, "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,"
wherein he styles Lamb "