abet sickens by subtraction of
interchangeables. I express myself muddily, _capite dolente_. I have a
dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it.
I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I
served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You
don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls
without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between
ten and four, without ease or interposition. _Taedet me harum
quotidianarum formarum_, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's
dish. Oh for a few years between the grave and the desk! they are the
same, save that at the latter you are the outside machine. The foul
enchanter [Nick?], "letters four do form his name,"--Busirane [2] is his
name in hell,--that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath
laid a heavier hand on me, not in present infliction, but in the taking
away the hope of enfranchisement. I dare not whisper to myself a pension
on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have
sucked me dry,--_Otium cum indignitate_. I had thought in a green old
age (oh, green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End,--emblematic
name, how beautiful!,--in the Ware Road, there to have made up my
accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and
Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to
Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever,
till I fairly walked myself off my legs,--dying walking! The hope is
gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast
against this thorn of a desk, with the only hope that some pulmonary
affliction may relieve me. _Vide_ Lord Palmerston's report of the clerks
in the War-office (Debates in this morning's "Times"), by which it
appears, in twenty years as many clerks have been coughed and catarrhed
out of it into their freer graves. Thank you for asking about the
pictures. Milton hangs over my fire-side in Covent Garden (when I am
there); the rest have been sold for an old song, wanting the eloquent
tongue that should have set them off! You have gratified me with liking
my meeting with Dodd. For the Malvolio story,--the thing is become in
verity a sad task, and I eke it out with anything. If I could slip out
of it I should be happy; but our chief-reputed assistants have forsaken
us. The Opium-Eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath