I have waited some time to answer your letter, in hopes of being able
to give you the information you require; but the information does not
come and I will wait no longer. I have not seen either Lamb or
Wainwright since last summer, when the former spent one day with me
here, and another day we all three met at the house of the latter,
who now resides in a place he has inherited from a relative at
Turnham Green. Lamb is settled at Endfield, about seven miles from
London, with his sister, who I fear is in a very indifferent state of
health; so his friends see very little of him. In this grand age of
utility, I suppose it will soon be discovered that a piece of canvas
is more advantageously employed as the door of a safe, where it will
secure a joint of meat from the flies, than if it was covered with
the finest hues that Titian or Rubens could lay upon it, and a piece
of paper better disposed of in keeping the same meat from being burnt
while it is roasting, than in preserving the idle fancies of a poet.
No matter: if it is so we must swim with the stream. You can employ
yourself in cultivating your cabbages and in handling the hay fork,
and I not quite so pleasantly in making catalogues of books. We will
not be out of fashion, but show ourselves as useful as the rest of
the world. In the meantime we may smile at what is going forward,
entertain ourselves with our own whims in private, and expect that
the tide some day may turn. My family, whom you are so kind as to
enquire about, are all well, and all following the order of the day,
except one, who has set himself to perverting canvas from its proper
use by smearing it over with certain colours, fair indeed to look
upon, but quite void of utility. I ought indeed to have made another
exception, which is, that they are multiplying much faster than Mr.
Malthus would approve. Cowper says somewhere of those who make the
world older than the Bible accounts of it, that they have found out
that He who made it and revealed its age to Moses was mistaken in the
date. May it not be said of the anti-populationers that they
virtually accuse him of as great ignorance in the command to multiply
and replenish the earth? Well, you and I, Clare, have kept to this
text. May we observe all the rest as well! which is so good a
conclusion for a parson that I will say no more than that I am ever
Yours truly,