to Wright's and purchasing shoes. We pass our time in cards, walks, and reading. We attack Tasso soon. Never was such a calm or such a recovery. 'Tis her own words undictated."
Not Tasso only was attacked, but even Dante. "You will be amused to hear," he tells Carey, "that my sister and I have, with the aid of Emma, scrambled through the Inferno by the blessed furtherance of your polar-star translation. I think we scarce left anything un-madeout. But our partner has left us and we have not yet resumed. Mary's chief pride in it was that she should some day brag of it to you."
The year 1834, the last of Lamb's life, opened gloomily. Early in February was written one of the saddest and sweetest of all his utterances concerning Mary. With the exception of a brief, mournful allusion to her in his latest letter to Wordsworth these were his last written words about her, and they breathe the same tenderness and unswerving devotion at the close of his life-long struggle and endurance for her sake as those he wrote when it began. The letter is to Miss Fryer, an old school-fellow of Emma Isola:–"Your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover Street [the Moxons]. I see them pretty often. In one word, be less uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths of desolation as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me to be left to my sister. When she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling
