Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/220

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204
MARY LAMB.

its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.

"I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock-book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain-scenery, yet not "so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner or south- countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.

"C. Lamb and Sister."

Manning, who had latterly been "tarrying on the skirts of creation "in far Thibet and Tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last, in 1815, appeared once more on the horizon at the "half-way house" of Canton, to which place Lamb hazarded a letter,—a most incomparable "lying letter," and another to confess the cheat to St. Helena:—"Have you recovered the breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon. . . . Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false Nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off