"Good Heavens! what a bit only I've got left! How shall I squeeze all I know into this morsel! Coleridge is come home, and is going to turn lecturer on taste at the Royal Institution. How the paper grows less and less! In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the great Wall of China.--N.B. Is there such a wall? Is it as big as Old London Wall by Bedlam? Have you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton? If you are acquainted, remember me kindly to him." But we should be driven into as hard straits as Lamb, at the close of his epistle, if we, should attempt, in the small space that remains to us, to give any fair idea of the various "humours" and interests, of many kinds, of these letters. We pass at once to those that illustrate the last important incident of his life, his retirement from office. It is thus he describes his manumission, and the sort of troubled delight it brought with it, to Wordsworth:-- "_6th April, 1825._ "Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room, at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a-year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety. "I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday of last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; _i. e._, to have three times as much real time--time that is my own in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift." And to Bernard Barton he writes: "My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation, that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more of mind, to compose a letter. I am free, Bernard Barton--free as air! 'The little bird, that wings the sky, Knows no such liberty.' I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I came home for ever! "I have been describing my feelings, as well as I can, to Wordsworth, and care not to repeat. Take it briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change, but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among them all, at my old thirty-three years' desk yester morning; and deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch--fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure. "B. B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds! I have got £440 net for life, with a provision for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years."