1831 - Page 2

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] "Deputy-Grecian," "Grecian," etc., were of course forms, or grades, at Christ's Hospital.