Lamb's letters to correspondents are perhaps not quite so frequent now as formerly. He writes occasionally to his old friends; to Wordsworth, and Southey, and Coleridge; also to Manning, who is still in China, and to whom in December, 1815, he had sent one of his best and most characteristic letters, describing the (imaginary) death and decrepitude of his correspondent's friends in England; although he takes care (the next day) to tell him that his first was a "lying letter." Indeed, that letter itself, humorous as it is, is so obviously manufactured in the fabulous district of hyperbole, that it requires no disavowal. Manning, however, returns to England not long afterwards; and then the correspondence, if less humorous, is also less built up of improbabilities. He corresponds also with Mr. Barron Field, who is relegated to the Judicial Bench in New South Wales. Of him he inquires about "The Land of Thieves;" he wants to know if their poets be not plagiarists; and suggests that half the truth which his letters contain "will be converted into lies" before they reach his correspondent. Mr. Field is the gentleman to whom the pleasant paper on "Distant Correspondents" is addressed. In 1822 Charles Lamb and his sister travelled as far as Paris, neither of them understanding a word of the French language. What tempted them to undertake this expedition I never knew. Perhaps, as he formerly said, when journeying to the Lakes, it was merely a daring ambition to see "remote regions." The French journey seems to have been almost barren of good. He brought nothing back in his memory, and there is no account whatever of his adventures there. It has been stated that Mary Lamb was taken ill on the road; but I do not know this with certainty. From a short letter to Barron Field, it appears, indeed, that he thought Paris "a glorious picturesque old city," to which London looked "mean and new," although the former had "no Saint Paul's or Westminster Abbey." "I and sister," he writes, "are just returned from Paris. We have eaten frogs! It has been such a treat! Nicest little delicate things; like Lilliputian rabbits." But this is all. His Reminiscences, whatever they were, do not enrich his correspondence. In conversation he used to tell how he had once intended to ask the waiter for an egg (oeuf), but called, in his ignorance, for Eau de vie, and that the mistake produced so pleasant a result, that his inquiries afterwards for Eau de vie were very frequent.