The New River before it has been sodded over, and even the wool-gathering George Dyer, with his head in the clouds, could not tumble into it now. That was one of the most madly ludicrous scenes ever conceived, and was thus described by Lamb: “I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation than on seeing my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit, a few Sundays back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of turning down the right-hand path, by which he had entered, with staff in hand and at noon-day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear.” B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) happened to call soon after and “met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of great alarm--she was whimpering, and could only utter, ‘Poor Mr. Dyer! poor Mr. Dyer!’ in tremulous tones. I went upstairs aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water as a well-established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the ‘crystal spring,’ was sitting upright in bed, perfectly delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood up like so many needles of iron-gray. He did not (like Falstaff) ‘babble o’ green fields,’ but of the ‘watery Neptune.’ ‘I soon found out where I was,’ he cried to me, laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow.” The “cheerful dining-room, all studded over, and rough, with old books,” is level with the front garden, and unchanged except that its several windows have now been cut into one large one: as also has been done above, in the “lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints.” The prints and the old books are gone, and rigid rows of decorous volumes stare stonily from their shelves; grim horsehair chairs refuse the aforetime free and unforced invitation; and the stuffed corpses of dead birds, and other framed horrors of the period all about, strike terror to our souls. Against the wall, rears itself rigourously a prim piano, from which _he_ would have fled aghast; for, in her goodness, nature had given him no taste for music, and he never had to pretend to care for it. He was constitutionally susceptible of noises, and a carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer noon, would fret him into more than midsummer madness; but these single strokes brought no such anguish to his ear as did the “measured malice of music.” He affirmed that he had been goaded to rush out from the Opera, in sheer pain, seeking solace in street sounds!