e. Shall I say two? We see scarce anybody. Can I cram loves
enough to you all in this little O? Excuse particularizing.

C.L.

[1] See preceding letter.

[2] Here was inserted a sketch answering to the description.

CIII.

TO MRS. HAZLITT.

_May_ 24, 1830.

Mary's love? Yes. Mary Lamb quite well.

Dear Sarah,--I found my way to Northaw on Thursday and a very good woman
behind a counter, who says also that you are a very good lady, but that
the woman who was with you was naught. We travelled with one of those
troublesome fellow-passengers in a stage-coach that is called a
well-informed man. For twenty miles we discoursed about the properties
of steam, probabilities of carriages by ditto, till all my science, and
more than all, was exhausted, and I was thinking of escaping my torment
by getting up on the outside, when, getting into Bishops Stortford, my
gentleman, spying some farming land, put an unlucky question to
me,--What sort of a crop of turnips I thought we should have this year?
Emma's eyes turned to me to know what in the world I could have to say;
and she burst into a violent fit of laughter, maugre her pale, serious
cheeks, when, with the greatest gravity, I replied that it depended, I
believed, upon boiled legs of mutton. This clenched our conversation;
and my gentleman, with a face half wise, half in scorn, troubled us with
no more conversation, scientific or philosophical, for the remainder of
the journey.

Ayrton was here yesterday, and as _learned_ to the full as my
fellow-traveller. What a pity that he will spoil a wit and a devilish
pleasant fellow (as he is) by wisdom! He talked on Music; and by having
read Hawkins and Burney recently I was enabled to talk of names, and
show more knowledge than he had suspected I possessed; and in the end he
begged me to shape my thoughts upon paper, which I did after he was
gone, and sent him "Free Thoughts on Some Eminent Composers."

"Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,
Just as the whim bites. For my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, or for Handel," etc.

Martin Burney [1] is as odd as ever. We had a dispute about the word
"heir," which I contended was pronounced like "air." He said that might
be in common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the
"Heir-at-Law," a comedy; but that in the law-courts it was necessary to
give it a full aspiration, and to say _Hayer_; he thought it might even
vitiate a cause if