Daily Dose

From The Letters of Charles Lamb to which are added those of his sister Mary Lamb, Volume Two, Edited by E. V. Lucas

BOOKS

"Dear Wordsworth,

Thank you for the books you have given me and for all the Books you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your Suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till People have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves More Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length.  For of those who borrow, some read slow, some mean to read but don't read, and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money, they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight..."

From #286, to William Wordsworth, dated at end: 9th April 1816.