I HEARD that you were going to China, with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories: it is a fragment of a “Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century,” which will no doubt be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the two and twenty readers of “The Albion” (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but becoming of no use when “The Albion” stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.
“The
Albion” is dead—dead as nail in door—and my revenues have died
with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to
the “Morning
Chronicle,”!!! Mister
Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence,
Mister Dyer. I have not seen
Perry the editor yet: but I am
preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know
that Mister Perry, in common with the great body of the
Whigs, thinks “The Albion” very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little
more decent and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an
abominable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me.
N’importe (as they say
in French): any climate will
| 224 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | August |
Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of ——, and ——, and ——, and M——, and ——, and ——, and ——. But Mister Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a Member of the National Assembly, or else in his Appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which. Do you remember an instance from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.
I live where I did, in a private manner, because I don’t like state. Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.
