1838-39. LETTERS OUT OF DATE. 173 



occasions, I thought I might happily and usefully occupy my 

 time in writing you all Christmas letters. Accordingly, I wrote 

 under the inspiration of mince-pies and mistletoe, roast goose 

 and boiled turkey, i.e., I wrote, as ' The Doctor' would say, 

 Christmatically, and never supposing that I needed, like Charles 

 Lamb writing a Christinas letter to a friend in China, to make 

 any allowance for the time that must elapse before my letter 

 reached its goal, I made the whole virtues of my story turn on 

 allusions which were out of date and meaningless, if read a 

 week later than they were written. Think after all this, after 

 wondering and wondering and wondering that my letters were 

 not acknowledged, let alone relished, that the first word should 

 be that my letters were very short (this referred to other and 

 former letters, as it afterwards came out), and next the staring, 

 hideous truth, that the epistles had loitered a whole month on 

 the way, and came lagging in like a cold dish at table, not quite 

 unpalatable, but, as the cook would say, quite out of season. 



" When I write letters to those I love, and having time, and 

 having the happy mood on me, feel that I have written what 

 will please them, I am fond of anticipating the effect particular 

 passages will produce on the readers. Here a smile, I hope, 

 will be elicited ; there it will go hard, but the smile will be 

 fostered into a full laugh ; at another place a doubtful shake of 

 the head may be given, and the whole letter, perhaps, ended by 

 an exclamation, ' George will always be George !' And then 

 the re-readings of the choice passages, the spelling over and 

 over again of special lines, and perhaps the little tit-bits read 

 out to Jessie, or Jeanie, or Mary, all this had been amusing and 

 pleasing me in my thoughts about the letters, and then to find 

 that not merely had not these letters arrived in proper time, 

 but letters written afterwards, and of no value unless coming 

 after them, had arrived sooner, and been divested of their own 

 value, and seemed only to stand in the way of their tardy pre- 

 decessors. There now, I am sure, when you got my brief note 

 accompanying the verses to S., you thought my apologies for 

 brevity very ill-timed, when accompanying the confession and 

 proof that I had been devoting the time to spinning rhymes for 

 a lassie instead of writing to my dear mother ; whereas, had you 



