your female friend, and she must expect it. I should have
written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be. On Friday I
was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner excepted) to
eleven at night, last night till nine; my business and office business
in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I
must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep
a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter
days, and some few days besides, which I used to dub Nature's holidays.
I have had my day. I had formerly little to do. So of the little that is
left of life I may reckon two thirds as dead, for time that a man may
call his own is his life; and hard work and thinking about it taint even
the leisure hours,--stain Sunday with work-day contemplations. This is
Sunday; and the headache I have is part late hours at work the two
preceding nights, and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwards.
But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and
it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort,--

"To them each evening had its glittering star,
And every sabbath-day its golden sun!" [4]
to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time!
Oh that from that superfluity of holiday-leisure my
youth wasted, "Age might but take some hours youth
wanted not"! N.B.--I have left off spirituous
liquors for four or more months, with a moral certainty
of its lasting. Farewell, dear Wordsworth!

O happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure! From some returned English
I hear that not such a thing as a counting-house is to be seen in her
streets,--scarce a desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and
its "gripple merchants," as Drayton hath it, "born to be the curse of
this brave isle"! I invoke this, not on account of any parsimonious
habits the mercantile interest may have, but, to confess truth, because
I am not fit for an office.

Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodize, a stomach
to digest, and all out of tune. Better harmonies await you!

C. LAMB.

[1] In 1815 Wordsworth published a new edition of his poems, with the
following title: "Poems by William Wordsworth; including Lyrical
Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional
Poems, a new Preface, and a Supplementary Essay. In two Volumes." The
new poems were "Yarrow Visited," "The Force of