Page:The Ingoldsby Legends (Frowde, 1905).pdf/59



have replied sooner to your letter, but that the last three days in January are, as you are aware, always dedicated at the Hall to an especial battue, and the old house is full of shooting-jackets, shot-belts, and 'double Joes.' Even the women wear percussion caps, and your favourite (?) Rover, who, you may remember, examined the calves of your legs with such suspicious curiosity at Christmas, is as pheasant-mad as if he were a biped, instead of being a genuine four-legged scion of the Blenheim breed. I have managed, however, to avail myself of a lucid interval in the general hallucination (how the rain did come down on Monday!), and as you tell me the excellent friend whom you are in the habit of styling 'a Generous and Enlightened Public' has emptied your shelves of the first edition, and 'asks for more,' why, I agree with you, it would be a want of respect to that very respectable personification, when furnishing him with a further supply, not to endeavour, at least, to amend my faults, which are few, and your own, which are more numerous. I have, therefore, gone to work con amore, supplying occasionally on my own part a deficient note, or elucidatory stanza, and on yours knocking out, without remorse, your superfluous 7s, and now and then eviscerating your colon.

My duty to your illustrious friend thus performed, I have a crow to pluck with him—Why will he persist,—as you tell me he does persist—in calling me by all sorts of names but those to which I am entitled by birth and baptism—my ' Sponsorial and Patronymic appellations,' as Dr. Pangloss has it?— Mrs. Malaprop complains, and with justice, of an ' assault upon her parts of speech,' but to attack one's very existence—to