ntinue to
improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen which is the prize at your
young gentlemen's academy.

* * * * *

But don't go and lay this to your eyes. You always wrote
hieroglyphically, yet not to come up to the mystical notations and
conjuring characters of Dr. Parr. You never wrote what I call a
schoolmaster's hand, like Mrs. Clarke; nor a woman's hand, like Southey;
nor a missal hand, like Porson; nor an all-on-the-wrong-side sloping
hand, like Miss Hayes; nor a dogmatic, Mede-and-Persian, peremptory tory
hand, like Rickman: but you wrote what I call a Grecian's hand,--what
the Grecians write (or wrote) at Christ's Hospital; such as Whalley
would have admired, and Boyer [2] have applauded, but Smith or Atwood
[writing-masters] would have horsed you for. Your boy-of-genius hand and
your mercantile hand are various. By your flourishes, I should think you
never learned to make eagles or cork-screws, or flourish the governor's
names in the writing-school; and by the tenor and cut of your letters, I
suspect you were never in it at all. By the length of this scrawl you
will think I have a design upon your optics; but I have writ as large as
I could, out of respect to them,--too large, indeed, for beauty. Mine is
a sort of Deputy-Grecian's hand,--a little better, and more of a worldly
hand, than a Grecian's, but still remote from the mercantile. I don't
know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school-days; I
can never forget I was a Deputy-Grecian. And writing to you, or to
Coleridge, besides affection, I feel a reverential deference as to
Grecians still [3]. I keep my soaring way above the Great Erasmians, yet
far beneath the other. Alas! what am I now? What is a Leadenhall clerk
or India pensioner to a Deputy-Grecian? How art thou fallen, O Lucifer!
Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., etc.

C. LAMB.

[1] Talfourd relates an amusing instance of the universal charity of the
kindly Dyer. Lamb once suddenly asked him what he thought of the
murderer Williams,--a wretch who had destroyed two families in Ratcliff
Highway, and then cheated the gallows by committing suicide. "The
desperate attempt," says Talfourd, "to compel the gentle optimist to
speak ill of a mortal creature produced no happier success than the
answer, 'Why, I should think, Mr. Lamb, he must have been rather an
eccentric character.'"

[2] Whalley and Boyer were masters at Christ's Hospital.

[3] "De