Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/193

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MR. DAWE, R.A..
177

Winterslow as much as the spiteful elder sister did to go to the well for a gift to spit diamonds.

"Jane and I have agreed to boil a round of beef for your suppers when you come to town again. She, Jane, broke two of the Hogarth glasses while we were away; whereat I made a great noise.

"Farewell. Love to William, and Charles' love and good wishes for the speedy arrival of the Life of Holcroft and the bearer thereof . Charles told Mrs. Godwin Hazlitt had found a well in his garden which, water being scarce in your country, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came in great haste the next morning to ask me if it were true."

Hazlitt, too, remembered to the end of his life those golden autumn days; "Lamb among the villagers like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths;" the evening walks with him and Mary to look at 'the Claude Lorraine skies melting from azure into purple and gold, and to gather mushrooms that sprung up at our feet to throw into our hashed mutton at supper.'

When Lamb called to congratulate Mr. Dawe on his good fortune his housekeeper seemed embarrassed, owned that her master was alone, but ushered in the visitor with reluctance. For why? "At his easel stood D. with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side—a live goose. Under the rose he informed me that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns. I smiled at an engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours; but a contempt of small gains was never one of D.'s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of warriors, kings rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The