Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/37

 Rh unkindly of Miss Landon that, if she belonged to him, he would lock her up and feed her on bread and water until she left off writing poetry. And for Miss Wesley he entertained a cordial animosity, only one degree less lively than his sentiments towards Miss Benger. Miss Wesley had a lamentable habit of sending her effusions to be read by reluctant men of letters. She asked Lamb for Coleridge's address, which he, to divert the evil from his own head, cheerfully gave. Coleridge, very angry, reproached his friend for this disloyal baseness; but Lamb, with the desperate instinct of self-preservation, refused all promise of amendment. "You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you," he wrote tartly, "in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burs in the wind." … "Of all God's creatures," he cries again, in an excess of ill-humour, "I detest letters-affecting, authors-hunting ladies." Alas for Miss Benger when she hunted hard, and the quarry turned at bay!